


the ghosts won’t matter ‘cause we’ll hide in sin

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Boys With Toys, Established Relationship, Force Ghosts, General Hux Is Not A Nice Person, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-25 01:59:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 51,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6175885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren defects from the First Order, taking only one thing with him.</p><p>General Hux, however, does not appreciate being hauled around the galaxy like an oversized suitcase full of contraband garbage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There's a Big Bang going on at the moment, and I told myself to do it, and then talked myself out of it entirely because I have ridiculous anxiety issues and also am not the kind of writer who visually inspires people, so. The unfortunate thing is, though, that I came up with an idea for a longish story. And even though I swore never to write longfic in this fandom, considering the sheer talent of the people already doing so, I still felt compelled to write it. Dammit. I'm an idiot. So, bearing in mind that I am the most casual of casual fans and also not very good at these things in general, here it is: Hux, seeing more of the Force than he ever really wanted to. Although it's probably not like the poor bastard didn't deserve it.
> 
> Also, the fic title comes from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWNRRnXmGKs). Mostly because it makes me laugh in all the wrong ways. I told you I was bad at this game, especially as the actual theme of the fic is far closer to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GINpKSkZawk). Fuck.

It wasn’t as if a person could ever really learn to expect Kylo Ren. His habit of appearing unannounced and uninvited was as legendary as how quickly he could ruin a piece of fundamentally important equipment. But when he swept into Hux’s office this time, without so much as a knock, Hux found himself utterly unprepared. The last he’d been aware, Ren was still in an induced coma in the medwing.

“I am leaving,” he announced with his usual lack of finesse. Hux only blinked, stylus paused mid-word upon the screen of his datapad.

“Oh.”

The scowl deepened. “I need my shuttle ready by the end of the shift.”

“I see.” With deliberate care, Hux saved his work, set the datapad down; the stylus he kept in his hand, as familiar and welcome as the weight of a blaster. “I take it we are not accompanying you to Leader Snoke?”

“No. You are not.”

“I see,” he said, again. And then, simply for propriety’s sake, “Travel well, Lord Ren.”

Ren had never been much of a conversationalist, but even this awkward silence was unusual for him. And the staring didn’t help; had Hux been a lesser man, he might have squirmed beneath such abnormal unblinking scrutiny.

But he had the presence of self to observe in return, noting how very odd Ren appeared without his mask. Of course he’d always been a mismatched gestalt of a creature, but the pinkened scar of the scavenger’s victory now bisected his face into two uneven halves. It made him look more peculiar than even his previous get up. Perhaps Ren had decided he did not need the helmet now his naked face looked sufficiently deranged to match the mind beneath it.

Given the rest of his body was covered by his usual robes, there were no other visible signs of his injury. Hux almost regretted it, though he’d seen the man utterly humiliated already. He just wasn’t above an encore performance. Pushing such matters away as needlessly indulgent, Hux now permitted himself a frown instead, leaning back in his chair. If Ren wasn’t just going to get out, he might as well try and make use of the fool standing in his office.

“How long have you been awake?”

“A few day cycles,” but from the crease in his brow Hux had the distinct feeling he wasn’t actually trying to be infuriatingly vague; he appeared to genuinely have no idea.

“And Snoke spoke with you?”

“Yes.” For some reason, his face twisted, as if in remembrance of intense pain. It disappeared as soon as it had come. “Not through the projection chamber.”

Hux allowed himself to take faint comfort in that. He himself had not spoken directly with Snoke since retrieving Ren from the surface. That was to be expected, given the circumstances, though it made the situation no less bitter a pill to swallow: the _Finalizer_ and her crew left to a dead course, waiting for the instigator of their failures to heal to usefulness.

And now, he was leaving them.

His hand wrapped tighter about the stylus, closed hard enough that he heard it crack beneath the pressure. “I won’t say it’s been a pleasure, Ren. I rather think we’re beyond all that.” The smile he chose felt tight upon his face, too wide for the half-set features of a mask he hadn’t expected to wear today. “But I do hope your training will help the First Order rise against those who would cast the systems into chaos and ruin.”

A wild light, almost feral, entered his eyes; the stylus skittered across the desk, fell to the floor as Hux reared back. Ren had stalked forward, bent now over the desk, hands slammed down and face so close to his own he could taste hot breath upon his lips.

“I want you.”

“I – _what_?”

“You know what.” Drawing back as quickly as he had appeared, Ren now began to pace, long cloak flaring around his calves. Hux only watched, grotesquely fascinated, as he might have observed some unfortunate worker pitching into a rotor they ought to have been repairing. With a roll of eyes, he leaned over, retrieved the stylus, and tossed it in the trash.

“I have _work_ to do, Ren,” he said as he straightened, waving one hand towards the door. “And I cannot be disturbed from my own demise just because some idiot child decided he needed one last bloody fuck before his master called his hound back to the kennel!”

And now Ren stopped, breath coming hard, pupils dilated so wide that all the colour of his irises seemed quite swallowed up. Hux took in the flushed skin, hands clenched in fists, and slumped back in his chair. With index finger and thumb pinching hard at the bridge of his nose, he swallowed back on a series of particularly colourful curses. Neither action did anything for the headache above and around it.

“Kark it,” he muttered, and winced at a sharp stab of pain. Need poured off Ren in waves of sensation that were nearly palpable, even to one such as Hux, a person so far from the Force he found its existence almost academic. _Had_ thought it academic, until the Master of the Knights of Ren had been dropped into his lap.

Many times, Hux found it to be a mistake to simply _speak_ with Kylo Ren. Which really made it all the more ridiculous that this had happened at all. Perhaps once might have been excusable. Twice, unreasonable. Thrice, pushing insane.

He’d lost count by now. And if it happened again, it would just be yet another mistake inn a very long series of them.

“Take the afternoon off.” Ren’s voice vibrated, held a hint of static even though he hadn’t worn the damn helmet since they’d left Starkiller. “Say you need to speak with me, before I leave.”

The breath he drew was shaking, a tangle of furious temptation. “Did you miss the part where I said I have work to do?”

“This might be the last time you ever see me.”

Hux couldn’t read the tone Ren had spoken those words in. He told himself he didn’t want to as he leaned down to open a desk drawer. “Well, that’s a risk I am willing to take.”

For such a large man, Ren moved with remarkable silence when he wished it. Hux found him pressed against his back, reaching around with wordless intent. He jerked back, found a wall of muscle and dark clothing. “What are you _doing_?”

“Summoning Lieutenant Mitaka.”

“What – how dare you!”

And even after pressing the comms button Ren still bunched up against the desk, lips warm on his ear. “I need you.”

This time when Hux elbowed him in the gut, Ren backed off; he had the distinct impression he hadn’t actually made Ren go anywhere. Still he stood with chin tilted high, rounding on Ren with eyes blazing and feet planted in a martial stance. “The entire _ship_ needs me in one way or another, Ren. I am necessary to the _First Order_. You don’t get to take priority—”

The kiss took him by surprise: hungry, demanding, selfish and grasping. It was everything Ren wanted and Hux was too stunned not to let him take it, at least at first. And then he braced two hands on his chest, shoved him back. Again, he knew Ren went only because he wanted to. Bunching his hands to fists, he prepared to punch him anyway.

“How _dare_ you, you idiot child—”

Ren raised one eyebrow, very high. “General. We have company.”

His head whipped around so fast it was just lucky he didn’t tear something in the process. “Mitaka.”

The man in the doorway, very pale and clearly unhappy despite his parade stance, nearly wilted. “General.”

While Hux himself certainly couldn’t run about dipping grubby little fingers in people’s minds at will, he could assume from the man’s expression he hadn’t seen the kiss, only its aftermath. And it seemed to be just another argument between the two highest ranking officers on the ship. It made him sigh, to think that such idiocy had become this: just another day, on the _Finalizer_.

_The very last day, thank the Empire._

As Mitaka squirmed, spine very straight and jaw painfully tense, Hux pointedly did not look at the other man at his side. “Kylo Ren is leaving us.”

Relief caused the lieutenant’s shoulders to sag, though only for a moment; the man pulled himself back to full military attention with an admirable swiftness. Although Hux certainly hadn’t considered reprimanding him. As far as he was concerned, all drinks would be on the house tonight.

And Mitaka swallowed, eventually managed a very even, very short, “Oh.”

Hux wore his own smile on the inside. And he didn’t care that Ren could see it. “Make certain his command shuttle is ready to leave by the beginning of the evening changeover.” And then, quite before he could remind himself of how very a terrible idea it would be, “I myself have matters to discuss with Lord Ren before he disembarks, and therefore, outside of unforeseen emergency, will be unavailable for the rest of my own shift.”

He dipped his dark head, took the unspoken leave. “Very good, sir.”

Only when the door had slid closed and the locking mechanism hissed into place did Hux risk turning. “Congratulations, Ren. You’ve now convinced Mitaka that by the start of the next shift, the _Finalizer_ is going to be a floating graveyard of a billion separate pieces.”

The only answer he received was utter silence. And Hux rolled his eyes, knowing it wouldn’t be the last time. Not yet. Reaching over to power down the datapad, he pursed his lips, and tried not to think too hard about the amount of work he would be catching up on come the evening.

_Come his departure. When he is gone. At least that will be the end of endless evenings of requisitions and arguments with accounting._

Glancing back, Hux found Ren had not so much as moved a muscle. The hulking mass of him, preternaturally still, sent an odd shiver down his spine; he’d not known such primal fear since early childhood. That had been before life at the academy had taught Hux that there was far more to fear from reality itself. “Well? We’re not doing it _here_. Because I can’t have the cleaners dealing with it, and I’m certainly not doing it myself.” He couldn’t help the edged smirk, the vague mental image of Ren in gloves and apron and little else. “Unless you are offering to do it?”

Ren’s lips twitched, just a little. “Your quarters.”

“Good. I don’t need your dead grandfather staring at me. I already am perfectly aware of how terrible an idea this is.”

The pause that followed wasn’t something Hux cared to evaluate. “I have already packed away my belongings,” Ren said, voice oddly strained. With a roll of his shoulders, Hux reached for his greatcoat.

“Fine. Your quarters. Unless you’ve already thrown the sheets in the laundry chute. Although, do you even _know_ where your laundry chute actually is?”

They ended up in Hux’s quarters. Much as he preferred to keep his professional and private lives sharply delineated, the fact that Ren was about to be surgically removed from said professional side meant it was easier to tolerate such intrusion on the personal one. And it was easier, besides; he knew where everything was. And he had no compunction about the idea of tossing Ren out on his mole-riddled backside if he decided to get clingy afterwards.

Yet it was hard to regret the decision when he had the man spread out before him like a private meal; no matter the idiocy that lurked within his broken mind, Ren had a remarkable body that Hux coveted with shameless intensity. He’d stripped him bare with his own hands, not caring where the clothes fell, or the state such urgency left them in. Ren would be gone soon enough, ridiculous costume and all, and Hux would not have to look at the sloppy way he wore and maintained it ever again.

For a person who dressed in such a way that no inch of skin was revealed, Kylo Ren appeared to rather enjoy being utterly naked. He was also worse than a felinx when it came to demanding touch; Hux could be within several metres of him, and he would arch his back, a whine in his throat, insistent upon immediate attention. Generally Hux ignored it for as long as it was amusing and just let the idiot suffer.

Today, Hux lay open palms on his chest, brow furrowed. Dressed almost entirely in his uniform – only boots, gloves, greatcoat, and cap missing – Hux leaned forward, tilting a great deal of his own weight on him. Ren opened a lazy eye, half-smile quirked in the same direction.

“Trying to suffocate me again, General?”

“Must keep the excitement alive, somehow.”

That eye fell closed. “If you have to choke me, I prefer the throat.” The grin grew in crooked curves, almost cruel. “Like you do.”

Hux considered punching him in it, settled for a muttered, “ _Bastard_ ,” instead.

And Ren rolled his broad shoulders, a satiated beast after a successful hunt and kill. “Probably,” he offered, and frowned. “How about you? Are you _really_ the only son of the great and departed Commandant Brendol Hux, or just some servant’s get on your lady mother?”

The vicious twist of one nipple earned Hux a shouted complaint. But given Ren didn’t push Hux off – and in fact pushed _into_ the hand still upon his chest – they both knew him for the liar he was. With teeth digging into his smile Hux circled the growing bruise with his index finger, contemplated biting it to bleeding, and then just returned to his earlier studies.

Hands passed over Ren’s shoulders: wide, broad, muscled but not heavily so. His body followed much the same pattern, narrowing down to slim hips and strong thighs. Hux himself had never been particularly interested in physical activity, rarely doing more than what was prescribed first by his schooling and then what was expected of an officer, but he had once yearned for a body like this. Like his father’s approval, it had consistently proven out of reach.

But in this, he could almost pretend it was his. Certainly it was now completely under his command. Illusory as it might be, in this moment it proved as real as anything else in his disintegrating life.

Hux had not seen Ren naked since the day before Starkiller had been fired. Even then, that had not been anything more than a half-clothed and sweaty fumble in one of the minor offices near the command bridge. Ren had made some snide remark about his speech and the fact the oscillator would probably burn out before it was done. Hux had issued a private reprimand wherein Ren himself said as little as possible, his mouth quite engaged in…other tasks.

Ren had changed since then, of course. They both had, and in ways more than just the physical. Hux still had his command, but there was no telling how long for. And the removal of Ren from the _Finalizer_ , even explained away by Ren’s need for further training, only cemented his fall from grace. Such permacrete boots might carry him right to very bowels of the unseen galaxy. There was no way of telling. He could only go on as before and hope his past glories could cast enough light over the tarnish of even such catastrophic failure.

But this was not the same at all. Tracing his hands over Ren’s side, Hux could not avoid the knotted scar tissue where the Wookiee’s bowcaster bolt had taken him in the side. Apparently the shot had missed all vital organs and major circulatory vessels, but it must have been painful. Certainly it would have killed outright a lesser being. Something like jealousy had Hux bunching three fingers, pushing hard at its centre. It garnered him a groan, but he noted Ren didn’t pull away. So he did it again, and frowned.

“Surely it doesn’t still hurt?”

When he glanced up, he found only large, dark eyes. “That’s not the point.”

“Of course it isn’t. More Jedi nonsense, I suppose?”

The scowl he wore, shadowed by the thunderous expression of his face, was quite at odds with the twitching flush of his cock lower down. “I’m not a Jedi.”

“But you were trained by one.” Ren only scowled deeper and Hux sighed, withdrew his hands. “Look, Ren. You didn’t come here to discuss spiritual beliefs, and neither did I.”

“You brought it up!”

“No, you did, but let’s not play _that_ charming little game.” Closing his right hand now about Ren’s chin, he pressed down just hard enough to hurt, made sure Ren could look nowhere else but to him. “We have better things to do.”

“Yes, we do,” Ren snapped back, words only slightly muffled by Hux’s grip. “But you seem determined to just sit there and _stare_ at me.”

When Hux sat back on his heels, he did it just a little too hard, and grinned to see Ren’s eyes widen on a hissing indrawn breath. The tight muscle of his own ass now pressed hard against Ren’s cock. The precome leaking from its head would no doubt be staining the seat of his trousers. Hux didn’t care. He’d be burning the entire uniform – and the sheets, besides – the moment Ren left his quarters.

“You made me take the afternoon off. I assumed that meant this wasn’t going to be a fumbled quick fuck.” Tilting his head, and his hips, Hux added thoughtfully, “Unless you genuinely wanted to talk to me about something work-related. In which case, let me get the lubricant—”

Both wrists were closed abruptly in Ren’s too-large hands. The grip proved loose, but with the promise of genuine restraint. His eyes had become the dark void of arousal gone too far.

“Hux.”

“What?”

Ren dragged him down, sharp and sudden. The kiss itself ended up softer than it had any right to be. And it lingered, too; Hux could still taste him on his lips when Ren drew back, leaving them close enough that they still shared breath. The dark eyes, made darker still by pupils blown wide, smiled where his lips did not.

“You talk too much.”

Hux rolled his eyes, jerked at his hands; Ren let him go without further word. The way his chest moved in shallow rise and fall, eyes watchful, said enough on their own as Hux divested himself of his clothes. Still, when he had folded the uniform he glanced back to see Ren had located the aforementioned lube, and already had two fingers inside himself.

“Stop that!” Getting up on the bed, he flicked an impatient finger at one spread thigh. “You know I like to do it myself.”

Ren crooked his wrist, groaned. “Yes, and you take too long,” he said, petulant and whining. “I need you to fuck me.”

At times like this, Hux wondered why he didn’t just stick to his own hand and an erotica novella on his datapad. “We’re back to this _quick and dirty fuck that didn’t require me to take an afternoon off_ thing again.”

Ren frowned. “Is once really enough for you, General? I remember your stamina being better than that.”

“Shut up, Ren.”

Having now pushed the offending hand away, Hux was upon him with all the fierce force of breaking storm; Ren could have been parched desert, given the easy welcome he offered. Still Hux pushed his knees up and wide with a roughness that was quite unnecessary, but hardly unexpected. Part of him scowled to see Ren had already opened himself up quite nicely; he suspected with some sourness that Ren had been at it long before he’d even come to proposition him. Ignoring the pleasant mental image of Ren writhing around somewhere with fingers up his ass thinking of Hux, he frowned deeper, and held his place.

“ _Hux_ ,” Ren whined, and Hux dug nails into soft skin.

“I told you to shut up.”

“Why can’t you just stick your dick in me and think about it later?”

“Because I don’t want to think about it later.” But enough had finally become enough, and Hux surrendered to the basest urge he knew. _Last times, and all that_ , he told himself, though it hardly made it better. This was something he’d shamefully enjoyed, rarely indulged. There had always been too much potential for fleeting partners to speak of it later. But then he couldn’t imagine Ren, indiscreet and socially inept as he was, ever wanting to tell any other living being that General Hux had a penchant for licking his asshole.

The musky heat of it was bitter, welcome; the movement of muscle beneath his tongue had him grinning, nose pressing against the silken skin of his perineum. Above him, Ren whimpered, held himself admirably still. He’d learned to be sensible enough to keep fingers out of his hair, ever since Ren had pulled too hard one morning and nearly lost a finger to Hux’s furious teeth. Trembling hands found anchor on his shoulders instead, fingertips dug hard enough to break blood vessels beneath his skin.

Ren would have cut off his own head with that ridiculous lightsaber before asking anything of the General up on the bridge. And yet here, buck-naked in every sense, pleas slipped from between spit-damp lips with a chanting regularity. With a wicked grin of his own, Hux moved to his knees and settled the long legs over his shoulders, one hand about the root of his cock.

He slid inside too easily; it made him frown, because Hux always preferred something approaching resistance in this. But then, for all everything else between them was so difficult, this part had always been surprisingly easy. Curling hands around the corded muscle of Ren’s thighs, Hux jerked his hips forward, sheathed himself to the hilt.

In answer Ren’s arms thrust outward, cruciform, muscles bunched as he clutched frantic at the sheets. The tangle of languages falling from his lips was near-indecipherable; even knowing only broad strokes of his background, it still surprised Hux to know Ren was a polyglot. But his own words were long gone, and he could only thrust harder. And then he laughed as Ren started having trouble with even the basics, vowels and syllables alike devolving into howls and moans and hissing broken breaths.

Pulling him up, changing the angle of his hips, Hux curved forward and pressed harder yet; he knew intimately the place that would send Ren over the edge. He rarely needed to work his cock, though Hux suspected Ren technically did not come by prostate stimulation alone. Even when he promised to stay out of Hux’s head – and Hux knew well that such promises were as worthless as the honour they were sworn upon – Hux could feel him there. Strangely, though it irritated him to fury later, it never bothered him at all in the moments when his own orgasm drew close.

He still felt faint surprise at it now. While never highly sexed to begin with, Hux had not thought the stress and sleeplessness following Starkiller’s fall would give him much libido. But the cruel familiarity of it was an easy crutch; he found it all too easy to lose himself in someone else. Release undid him in sudden seconds, mouth rounded on a silent cry, back arched and face turned upwards. And when he fell forward, boneless and undone, Ren’s legs closed around him, and then his ridiculous arms. In that powerful circle he trembled, eyes bunched to slits, breath harsh and hard. He hadn’t cried when Starkiller had itself turned supernova. He didn’t even remember how tears tasted; he’d forgotten how they worked, when he’d been a child.

It became something very much like crying now. Shaking, unable to stop, Hux cursed himself for a fool and yet only curled closer to the other man. Ren’s hand tangled in his hair, the other on his shoulder; there he lay, wordless as he first came himself, and fell silent.

Hux ached all over when he rose, turning blindly for the refresher. Ren did not follow. Nor did he disturb the too-long shower, given the water rationing even for the commander of the ship. Having successfully repressed the strange outburst, Hux returned to find Ren had not left. For once, the man chose sensibility, and said nothing of reddened eyes. Instead he only blinked, and indicated the bed in which he still lay.

“Again?” he asked, and Hux snorted.

“Well, as it turns out, I do actually have the afternoon off. How very convenient.”

The burgeoning argument ended in a tangle of limbs and sheets, the two of them on the bed kissing each other into something like submission. Or so they told themselves. Hux had never been fond of the pastime, and Ren had been frankly atrocious at it in the beginning; that had been the result of inexperience, and sheer bolshiness, both. Hux had taught him better just on sheer principle. And yet both enjoyed necking rather more than they were willing to admit, except by the sheer amount of time they could waste doing it.

Oddly, Ren drew back first. His eyes were very bright, high colour burning in his cheeks – except the scar. The skin was livid there, always. Hux kept his eyes fixed on his instead, even as Ren said the worst possible thing.

“Let me do it to you.”

“After what happened the first time?” That had also been the _last_ time, and for many eminently sensible reasons – mostly that Ren’s bumbling inexperience had left Hux limping around the _Finalizer_ for two days, and had made certain bodily functions far more interesting than they had any right to be.

Ren was not to be deterred. “Hux.” A callused hand dipped low, predictably curling around his cock. Mindful of the sensitive area, Hux slapped it away; it returned a moment later, hard and warm. “It’s different, now.”

_Everything is different now_. Hux sighed. The afternoon had been ruined long ago anyway. “Fine.”

His eyes lit up like a star-mad kid who’d just been permitted his first speeder. “Really?”

Already he regretted everything about this entire thing. Scowling, Hux pushed himself into a seated position, hair falling into his eyes, stinging them with sweat. Slicking it back with impatient grace, he raked his gaze over Ren’s body, still laid out before him. “I’ll ride you,” he announced, one hand raised to preclude any complaint. “I don’t trust you not to be a clumsy overeager idiot, especially if you’re not going to be here for me to make you suffer for hurting me.”

Oddly, Ren looked as if he’d been slapped. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Forgive me if past experience – and the state of my ship – says otherwise.”

His head turned, voice very low. “This is different.”

“So you keep telling me,” he muttered, and as he reached for the sticky tube of lubricant he felt his asshole pucker in regretful anticipation. “Why am I such an idiot?”

“You’re not an idiot, Hux.”

The strange sincerity of that just made it worse. “Again, recent experience would suggest otherwise,” he said with what he personally thought was an admirable dignity, and then ruined it by slapping a hand down on the ruined tangle of the coverlet. “Where did that lubricant go?”

When he glanced back, Ren held it out, cradled in one palm. “Can I?”

“I don’t know, _can_ you?”

Hux’s irritation, underlain with genuine fear, actually brought forth a brilliant, almost shy smile. “ _May_ I?”

He closed his eyes. “This is a mistake.”

And knew it to be true, several minutes later, when he lay on his back. His own hands gripped around his thighs, feet up somewhere near his head. Checking an internal sigh, he knew he had only himself to blame. He’d clearly said he wanted to be on top. And yet here he was, opened up like a whore with legs spread wide, Ren’s dick fully in and that face twisted in almost moronic ecstasy.

But Ren _had_ been careful. Hux even suspected he’d used the Force – surely in a practice not endorsed by the long-invalidated Jedi charter – to search Hux’s mind and ensure he didn’t in any way harm him. He knew he should still complain. But that same power was allowing Ren to hit his prostate on every stroke and even he wasn’t idiot enough to stop him doing that.

Midway through a particularly enthusiastic thrust, Ren shoved forward, caught Hux’s lips in something that started out more as a bite, before relaxing into a kiss. Hux tasted blood, but even that was not as unexpected as the act itself; much as they might do it as an alternative activity, it was rare enough during actual sex. Hux preferred to breathe. And to see what he was doing.

In this he couldn’t see a damn thing. Ren enveloped him whole, his broad form spreading like shadow made flesh. All was scent and taste and sensation; callused fingers moved knowing about his dick, coaxing his release. Even as he came hard, Ren did not retreat. His dick keep pushing hard against his prostate, and Hux curled in on himself, mind gone white-out blank and his body one screaming beautiful ache as he came again. He had never before had two orgasms in such quick sequence. He hadn’t even known it was possible.

Perhaps that explained why he appeared to have passed out. When he next became aware of his surroundings, it was to find fresh covers over him, skin slightly damp where he’d been wiped down. Bleary of mind and eye, he tried to prop himself up, found his arms barely supported even his meagre weight. Slumping down, he settled for scowling at Ren; he had just re-entered the room from the refresher, hair damp and towel around his waist. It took Hux far too long to realise he was holding out a glass. Ren had to put it under his nose, sloshing its contents, before he saw it at all.

“Here.”

Hux squinted, his throat made suddenly dry by the appearance of a cool beverage. “What?”

“Something to drink,” Ren said, quite unnecessarily, but then Ren often said things that were perfectly unnecessary. With a hand that still trembled, Hux accepted the glass, peered dubiously at its contents: a colourless liquid. No scent, low viscosity. Probably only cold water. The taste proved as much, when he ventured a sip.

And then he looked up, unspeakably irritated by the rapt way Ren watched him from where he’d settled on the side of the bed. “You’ve never done that before.”

“I…well.” He turned his head, a faint flush climbing up from his collarbone. Hux rolled his eyes, took a deeper swallow, almost lost a good chunk of it down his bare front.

“Getting sentimental in your old age, I see.” Shifting again, trying to regain a more seated position, he promptly winced at the warning twinge from lower down. “ _Kriff_ , I shouldn’t have let you do that.”

Ren appeared to be staring at his bare hands, opened in his lap. “But you did.”

“Yes, and you can go celebrate it somewhere else and never mention it to me again.” And now he stared into the glass, as if its contents could tell him anything about the futures that awaited them both. “Chances are Snoke will make sure we’re kept far apart anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

That made him snort; for someone who supposedly held great insight due to his wizardly powers, Ren could be strikingly naïve. “We’re not exactly the First Order’s model of military success, Ren.” Twisting the half-empty glass in his hands, he added bitterly, “You’ll go back to your training, I’ll likely be booted back to colonel or – gods forbid, _major_ – and never be permitted true executive rank again.” A short drink, and then: “Even if you end up taking down the Resistance entire, we’ll never see each other again.”

Ren stared at him. Hux met those damnable dark eyes for only a moment before Ren looked away, jaw very taut. “Finish your water.”

Following orders from Kylo Ren was not something Hux would ever do, but he _was_ thirsty. He drank it off, set the glass aside on his nightstand, and stretched his arms above his head. The chrono gave at least another hour before his shift officially ended. “Ready to go again, then?”

“I’m ready to go, yes.” Ren didn’t move, though at some point his hands had closed to fists. “Give it a few moments, and you will be too.”

Hux yawned, sudden and wide. “I think I need a nap, actually.”

“Good.”

The growing sense of satiation suddenly exploded into bitter suspicion. “Ren,” he began, then tripped over the thought and frowned, hands pushed very hard into the bed either side of him. The ship seemed to be swaying, very gently.

And Ren only shook his head, and still refused to move. “General.”

With a lurching lunge, Hux threw himself to the other side of the bed; it only grew worse when he tried to stand. The world spun like a coloured kaleidoscope shaking itself all to pieces, violent and all bright colour and no sound. “Ren, you _bastard_ —”

And yet he caught him as he fell, easy as a child reaching for a feather. “I’m sorry.”

“Like hell!”

“Well.” Ren sighed. “Maybe not.”

There might have been more, after that. But whatever Ren had put in the drink meant Hux never formed any memories regarding that time.

He still felt perfectly justified in hating him for every moment of it.

 

*****

 

He’d been tied to the bed – and for all the wrong reasons. Not that he and Ren had ever indulged in bedsport of this particular nature. Hux jerked up his wrists, found the knots clever and well-formed; the bed itself, a poky little thing designed for short naps only, proved bolted to the frame of the shuttle itself.

Beside him, dressed in his usual black, Ren stirred. The moment their eyes met, Hux smiled, and showed all his teeth while doing so.

“Untie me. Now.” And he blinked, just once. “I need to kill you.”

Raising an eyebrow, Ren did not move. Hux jerked his wrists again, smile dissolving into a fierce grimace.

“I mean it.”

And Ren rolled his tongue around his closed mouth, thick brows furrowed; when he spoke, it was with that same slow thoughtlessness that made Hux wonder sometimes if he were fully human. “I know you think I’m an idiot,” he said, eventually, “but even I’m not _that_ much of an idiot.”

He tried to kick out with one foot, found his ankles bound too. “I _hate_ you.”

“I know.”

After that, they both fell quiet. Despite the fact he fumed with an enthusiasm he hadn’t felt quite this strongly since the first time he’d been informed of Ren’s destructive tendencies, his head still swam with the hangover of whatever tranquiliser Ren had hit him with. It took him far longer than necessary before he finally thought to ask the most obvious of all questions.

“Where are we?”

“Not there yet.”

Hux closed his eyes. Most of the mental images that passed before them involved Ren in various states of screaming misery. Only after a long moment did he consider more about his actual position; though he spent little time in this class of shuttle, he recognised it as an Upsilon, even from as little information as its berth configuration. The shuttles hadn’t been designed for longhaul travel, either, but then Ren probably hadn’t bothered to read the manual.

Opening his eyes, he turned their full glare on his companion. “I need to piss.”

He blinked, very rapidly, and then his expression returned to its usual dull configuration. “I’m not untying you.”

Hux had opened his mouth to complain about cruel and unusual forms of incarceration when Ren presented him with a bottle. After that he had no words at all, just stared at him with incredulous disgust. He didn’t stop throughout the entire humiliating procedure, even when he flushed so red he didn’t know how it didn’t end in third degree burns.

Ren, for his part, appeared strangely unmoved by the whole debacle. Some weird Jedi thing, most likely. Not to mention the bastard was likely as not reading his thoughts, especially when he added with genuine uncertainty, “I don’t know why you’re so embarrassed about me doing this. I’ve had that thing up my ass.”

Hux felt moments away from actual spontaneous human combustion. “Would you just shut up.”

The lingering effects of the sedative reared their ugly head shortly afterwards. Hux was almost grateful to drift off again. When he woke later, it was to find himself very thirsty instead. Ren attempted to give him water from a glass, pressed to his lips. Predictably most of it ended all over his collar and chest. As Ren dabbed haplessly at the result, Hux realised for the first time he was dressed, though not in his uniform.

After his failure, Hux watched Ren toss the towel in the corner, and scowled at the mess. “Would you just untie me?” As Ren’s shoulders hunched, he gave a humourless chuckle. “And I know _your_ first reaction to this sort of thing would be to destroy the nearest console, but I have a little more self-preservation than that.”

Ren glanced over from the other side of the room, lips damp. “You’re going to punch me.”

“You’d deserve it.”

With a sigh, and the flick of one hand, the ropes worked free and slithered away in a fashion disturbingly serpentine. Hux told himself he wasn’t impressed. He spent a good few moments rubbing his wrists, testing his weight on uncertain legs. Then he rose, crossed the floor, stopped before Ren. The man raised one eyebrow. Hux smiled, reared back, and backhanded him across the face.

The force of it spun Ren right around, his great hulking form hunching forward, one hand pressed to a burning cheek. Adrenaline buzzed through Hux’s veins as he waited for immediate – and bloody – retribution, his hands now curled to fists; and yet when Ren straightened, turned back, his eyes were wide and wounded and little else.

“That wasn’t a _punch_!”

Now Hux shook out his aching hand, and regretted the action not a whit. “I changed my mind.” Narrowing his eyes, he returned his gaze to the console, found it locked to only onboard status updates; no navigation or destination details were apparent. “Where are we?”

The overly generous lips has twisted into something like a scowl, but Hux felt nothing to indicate it was aimed at him as Ren crossed the small space between them, leaning over the console to frown deeper at the readouts. “It’ll be a day or so more.” And even as Hux drew sharply out of Ren’s personal space, added with a sudden harshness, “Don’t even try to mess with the navcom, it’s keyed to me.”

His own anger flared quick and bright. “That sounds like a challenge.”

“Hux.” Despite the livid red of his slapped cheek, the mark of a chastised child, Ren’s expression managed to be something very close to monstrous. “ _Don’t_.”

Staring contests were the games of children. Hux still tried to win this one. And when he lost, it was very hard not to pick up something in the vicinity and heave it at Ren’s head. “Karking hell, I need a smoke,” he muttered, making his way towards the small galley.

“I made sure to get you plenty of cigarras.” Hux paused, felt the first curl of a genuine smile when Ren added, “But I thought it was against regulation to smoke on a command shuttle in flight.”

Hux made sure to blow his first lungful of smoke directly in Ren’s stupid face.

Later, seated in one of the viewports, Hux made his way through three cigarras before he stopped. Stubbing out the last in the now-empty cup of caf, he returned to the galley to tidy both away, extractor fans set high. It might be his favoured vice, but he didn’t care for the smell of it later.

Making his way to the front revealed Ren in the primary pilot’s seat. Much as was his wont, he didn’t appear to be doing much at all, besides watching the stellar smudge that made up the view beyond the transparisteel. Hux dropped into the second seat beside him, noting with distinct displeasure that all its screens were black and very very dead.

“Snoke doesn’t know.”

Ren’s eyes did not shift from hyperspace. “No.”

It wasn’t as though he’d expected Ren to be particularly forthcoming. But even that dead-eyed singular excuse for an answer constituted a new low for his lack of communication skills. Long fingers drummed on the dead console casing, the snare roll used to announce the arrival of a condemned man upon his gallows, and then Hux shook his head. “So, you’re a traitor now?”

“Something like that.”

The twist in his stomach had all the sharp pain of a knife slid between major organs. “Are we going to the Resistance, then? To your _mother_?” Only years of bitter self-discipline kept Hux in his seat, stopped him from clambering into Ren’s lap and pushing those stupid big dark eyes into his skull with only his thumbs. “And you better tell me the truth, Ren. Because if you’re planning on using me as a bargaining tool, as an apologetic _sacrificial peace offering_ , you owe me at least one good shot at this console first. With that damned lightsaber, even.”

Ren had not moved. If not for the fact he talked yet, he could have been a corpse. “I’m not taking you to the Resistance.” There might have been the faintest hint of regret, somewhere in there. It reminded Hux of the weeping bloodied mess he’d found in the snow on Starkiller, the land around them a hellscape of snow and molten lava. The dichotomy of it had almost been as striking as that of the man himself: cold enough to cut down his own father, hot enough to scream about it even as his own death closed long fingers about his convulsing throat.

Ren’s voice remained very flat, as inflectionless as his vocoder had been. “We’re not going anywhere near them.”

While Hux already knew the attempt to be futile he still searched Ren’s expression. It did nothing for the mental and emotional distance between them. And while he had never wanted anything to do with the Force, in this moment he could have made some damned good use of a little mind reading.

“Why?”

The sudden question engendered no answer. The fact that Hux hadn’t expected one didn’t mean it pissed him off any less.

“ _Ren_.” And he smiled; it was the expression he tended to reserve for informing crew members of inadequate performance and impending prolonged reconditioning. “If you were alone here, you could sulk all you like and I wouldn’t give a damn. But you dragged me into whatever this is and I deserve a bloody answer. Right _now_.”

For the first time since the conversation had begun, Ren looked at him. The smile froze on Hux’s face; he had seen many a dead body in his time, but never one that moved. And Ren shook his head, looked away. “I need you.”

He cleared a throat that felt full of broken glass, swallowed, felt the shards roiling in his stomach. “For _what_?”

The shrug held a nearly helpless quality that made Hux want to slap him. Again. “I don’t know.” And he looked back to him, both hands having shot up in a surprisingly defensive manoeuvre, given Ren could have frozen him in place with a mere thought. “Don’t hit me.”

Hux still debated fiercely on whether or not he should take advantage of Ren’s apparent loss of preservation instinct; he settled for fisting his hands in the man’s collar and hefting them nose to nose. “I _said_ I deserve answers—”

“And I don’t have them.” Ren drew back with swift force, Hux’s fingers aching from the sudden snap of their removal. But Ren had turned away, had risen to his feet, now beginning to pace the limited space available in the small cockpit. “Not yet,” he muttered, and he almost seemed he spoke to only himself when he added in fierce whisper, “I won’t let any harm come to you.”

Hux snorted, swivelled the co-pilot’s seat around to glare at him properly. “You drugged me. And kidnapped me. And tied me to a bed.”

The wince was accompanied by both his hands rising, clutching at the hair of his temples as if he had a mind to pull it out. Then they fell limp, and Ren himself came to a complete halt. His expression had turned very ugly when he looked up again. “I thought you were all about the bigger picture. Didn’t you kill billions of people and say it was for the greater good?”

Rolling his eyes to the ceiling, Hux let the bait sink in bloodied waters. “Semantics aren’t your forte, Ren.”

Something very close to a chuckle escaped the other man; Hux frowned even as Ren’s expression returned to that odd hunted look. “I know that,” he said, and now actual petulance had entered his tone. “You need to trust me.”

Pursing his lips, Hux wished that he’d been better at knife throwing as a cadet. Or that he had a knife to hand at all. “I need a drink,” he said, and turned to glare at the nearest section of cabinetry. “You better have alcohol on this shuttle.”

“It’s not a good idea, not with that sedative still in your system.”

Turning around, he wore a smile as sweet as any society debutante about to do battle for the most connected single man on the dancefloor. “Get me a drink, Ren,” Hux said, “or I will perform a castration. On you. With _no_ anaesthesia.”

Ren had no taste in alcohol, as it turned out, but as Hux wasn’t drinking for pleasure it didn’t actually matter. The agreeable buzz he got from the quarter bottle he downed was endgame enough. It wasn’t as if he intended to drink himself to oblivion, either. But it proved enough to hasten him to sleep, despite the hard knot of dread low in his stomach.

Even with the confined space of the commandeered shuttle, Hux managed to almost entirely ignore Ren’s presence for the rest of the alleged trip. The man still pissed him off by merely existing. Hux had been the commander of a Resurgent-class destroyer, so how Ren could believe he wouldn’t notice the vagrancies of their course, he didn’t know. He also didn’t care. But the truth of the matter was that Hux couldn’t trace anything without equipment, and fooling with the onboard computers had proved impossible when he’d discovered they’d all been set to Shyriiwook. That Shyriiwook even _had_ a written form had come as something of a bitter surprise.

Hux had joined Ren in the cockpit for their eventual landing, for what little good it did him. A small anonymous planetoid unfolded beneath their descent, with nothing in the surrounding system that looked at all familiar. His foul mood only deepened as he stepped down the ramp, shielding his eyes against the light of the binary suns, the hissing exhaust fading as the ship powered down to silence.

There he waited, very still. A faint wind picked up, rippled through the high canopy; sudden birdsong erupted, the buzz of insects a low hum beneath. The scent of the tall trees, rich and sticky, scratched the back of his throat. Hux curled up his nose. He was going to hate this place.

Apparently having finished shutting down the ship – Hux was frankly surprised he’d bother, given the man never finished anything else he started – Ren strode out behind him. The shame of earlier appeared to have quite evaporated, allowing him to storm past Hux with his usual lack of grace and interest in anyone save himself. Hux could have stuck a foot out. But even he had some standards when it came to open brawling.

Ren’s direction became quickly obvious; a low building squatted before them, the prefabricated thing too anonymous to be First Order. But given the lack of any distinct weathering or regrowth of forest, it was clearly very new. Hux frowned, noting the generator attached to the rear, and solar panels glittering upon the flat roof. It would be off the grid – not that Hux could see anything to indicate there _was_ a grid at all. No road led away from the tiny compound, the clearing clumsily made. From the scorch marks on the trees, at least some of it had been done by a lightsaber.

“Welcome home,” he muttered, and stepped onto the ground. It crunched warmly beneath his bootheels, the rich soil scattered with dry needles fallen from the trees above. He had nothing of his own to take from the ship, and no particular direction to go, and so followed Ren’s path. He didn’t ask if Ren needed anything unloaded. It wasn’t as if he had any particular desire to be helpful.

The door had been propped open, revealing Ren inside. A black blob in the dim light, he crouched beside a crate, rifling through the contents. Hux walked past, to one of the doors along the far wall. The first opened on a refresher. The next, a bedroom. The last, another bedroom. It was bigger than the previous. He chose that one, went inside, and closed the door.

Hux didn’t remember falling asleep. In fact he didn’t even remember removing his boots, but when he opened his eyes he found the light changed and his feet bare. A glance out the window told him that one of the suns had vanished, the other sinking fast. He returned his attention to the simple room, found it as utilitarian as anything in the First Order. But it was not something Ren could have acquired from their supplies. Hux had never quite seen its like.

No sign of Ren remained in the main living space, save for a pot bubbling upon the low heat of the small stove. Lifting the lid, Hux found it surprisingly palatable, by smell; he took a taste, and decided he hadn’t been wrong. Only after eating two bowls, and regretfully denying himself a third, did he venture outside again.

Ren had taken up a place in the clearing, cross-legged before a fire built up before him. Though he no longer wore the robes that had marked him as a madman – or a Knight of Ren, if Hux was feeling generous – he still wore black, melting into the shadows. Hux wouldn’t have expected anything less.

“Did you sleep well?”

Hux took a place to Ren’s right, stared into the flames. It hadn’t exactly been cold in the cabin, but the rich heat of a fire was a novelty he wouldn’t soon ignore. “I’m tired of sleeping,” he said, very short. And then: “Are you going to tell me where we are, now?”

Ren did not blink. His eyes burned orange in the firelight, unmoving, too bright. “No.”

“Or what I’m doing here?”

His gloved hands had been lying motionless in his lap; Hux watched now as they tightened to fists. “I told you already.” And when Ren looked at him, his eyes extinguished to black, they seemed little more than holes in his pale face. “I need you.”

Hux had stopped believing in monsters in early childhood. He’d forgotten that meant that didn’t mean they didn’t really exist. “For what?” he croaked, and then allowed his own anger to surface once more. “And if you say _sex_ I’m going to rip off first your cock and then your head and then I’ll stuff said cock in what’s left of your neck. Just so we’re clear on that.”

Ren’s eyes, overlarge though they already were, had widened quite considerably. “You’re very bloodthirsty at times, General.”

“I have a headache.” A log shifted in the fire, sent up a shower of sparks; Hux watched them rise, each dying out the higher it tried to reach. “And I suspect I’m no longer a general.”

“No.” The bastard almost sounded apologetic. “Probably not.”

The fire murmured again; Ren offered it fresh sacrifice in the shape of two more logs, his movements deft and careful. Hux found that strange – but then, he had seen the man fight. How he could transform his clumsy childish rage into a sleek hurricane of pure destruction, Hux would never know. He didn’t even want to. “Does this mean I have to call you Kylo?” he asked, sudden. “Because you’re hardly Master of the Knights of Ren, here.”

Ren startled, as if he had not realised. Then, he shrugged; his face was almost entirely cast in shadow, and utterly unreadable. “Probably.”

“Tough. I’m still calling you Ren.”

Pushing against his knees, Hux rose, scowled at the collection of sap-sticky needles attached to his trousers. It wasn’t as if he liked the borrowed clothing, but he was still wearing it. Having brushed as much as possible away, turning back to the cabin, he stopped only when Ren’s voice floated uncertain between them.

“I would have given you the choice.” And he could have sounded amused, if not for the alien sorrow beneath it, when he added, “But you’d have made the wrong one.”

He didn’t realise he’d fisted his hands, until he felt the nails digging hard into his palms. “I believe that’s my right.”

“We don’t always get to exercise our rights. This is a war.”

Trust Ren to sound reasonable only when it didn’t make the slightest sense at all. Hux closed his eyes. How he wanted to smack him again. Harder, this time. Maybe enough to break his stupid neck. But instead he felt the heat of the fire upon his retreating back, and imagined Ren at its centre. Screaming.

“Please don’t do that.”

Hux didn’t turn back. “Why not? It’s my head. If you don’t like it, get out.”

“It’s very _loud_.”

It was the work of a moment to think it harder. Ren hissed, as if Hux had slipped a hot iron beneath his nails. Only then did Hux walk away. Behind him, Ren drew a trembling breath, and he almost felt guilty.

Then he looked at the sky above, now completely turned to a curtain of unfamiliar stars, and didn’t give a damn at all.

 

*****

 

Five day cycles into whatever nonsense this was, and Hux had some idea of what going mad felt like. He had spent the first two trying to rewire the navcom, only to return on the third day and find the console a smoking ruin. His enraged screaming had startled an entire nesting colony of strange native birds into apparent relocation. Ren himself hadn’t dared reappear for the remainder of that cycle’s daylight hours.

After that, he’d had little left to him but exploration. The terrain proved unfamiliar in every known aspect, but his schooling at the academy had involved many a life-threatening outdoor exercise. He’d lost several classmates that way. They hadn’t been mourned. If they couldn’t look after even themselves in hostile territory, they certainly couldn’t be trusted with the command of an entire unit under similar – and realtime – circumstances.

With no real task or goal in mind, Hux chose to circle outwards, mapping the territory on his datapad as he did so. The nearby river emptied into a nearby lake, he found; large and apparently glacier-fed, it stretched as far back as a cluster of blue-grey mountains. They teased him with their height, distant peaks cutting a jagged outline against the grey sky above. They were far closer to the stars than he was – not that he often saw the stars, anymore. The cloud cover rarely lifted, though it did not seem to rain overmuch. Hux could not be displeased about that. Rain was one of his least favourite meteorological phenomena.

But despite the persistent inversion layer, the plant life grew strong and true. Hux assumed it to be a temperate climate, judging by their apparent growth patterns. The planet appeared to support few animals, aside from some distressingly large butterflies that he’d learned to avoid. Certainly Ren had not thought to warn him about any large or dangerous fauna. Hux still kept a charged blaster ready to hand at all times. At the very least, sniping vicious butterflies was something to do with his time.

On the sixth day he returned to the base camp far earlier than usual; the two suns were only just nearing their approximate meridian. Ren clearly had not expected him, standing rigid and silent. And also, shirtless; the dark hair shone damp in the dull light as he dried himself near the blackened hollow where he liked to light his fires. That still made no sense to him. There was heat and light in the cabin. Hux figured it was just more Jedi drama and tended to ignore it the way he did everything else.

But he found it hard now to ignore the expanse of exposed skin before him. How easy it was, to remember it pressed to his own, to recall the heat of him inside and out. Pursing his lips, Hux determined to walk past with head held high, and fixed his gaze upon the opened door.

“Have you been crying?”

His hand froze on the frame. “ _Excuse_ me?”

“Hux.”

And he had come close, _too_ close, standing beside him on the threshold of the cabin that might have once doubled as a cargo container. “Go away, Ren.”

One hand closed too hard over his upper arm, turning him around; the wideness of those damn eyes might have been comical, if not for the fact the man was still touching him. “You have been!”

“I have _not_.” Hux shook him off, briefly contemplated going inside and slamming a door between them. But then he’d never liked to be backed into a corner. He’d moved halfway across the clearing before he turned around, lips twisted in an ugly snarl. “We’re basically living outdoors like savages,” he said, and Ren, trailing behind him as he hitched as the precariously wrapped towel, looked nothing if not bewildered.

“What has that got to do with it? Do you really hate being off-ship so much you’ll cry about it?”

Only his frank irritation kept Hux from tracing his eyes over the revealed sharp lines of those hips, and the thought of what lay at their angled apex. “I’m allergic to everything, you idiot.”

“I – what?”

For a moment Hux genuinely believed Ren didn’t actually know what he meant at all. And then he sighed, remembered that all Ren likely knew about Hux was his military particulars, and the fact he had intensely poor choice in sexual partners. “Allergies. I have them.” Even thinking of them made his nose itch; he used the excuse of searching out a tissue to avoid meeting the idiot’s incredulous gaze. “It’s obviously not an issue when I am on-ship. Which, at this present moment, I am _not._ ”

“But…” He paused long enough to allow Hux to discretely blow his nose and tidy the evidence away, which was about the most polite thing he’d ever managed in Hux’s presence. And then, as if to prove he was still an idiot, he said, “I never saw you like this on Starkiller.”

“That planetoid was an ice-riddled hellscape. Pollen wasn’t generally an issue.” Now he opened the flap of the satchel slung about his shoulders, searching out a canteen. The waters of the lake had proven rather refreshing, and entirely non-toxic. Hux took a long draught, put it away, and found Ren hadn’t moved so much as an inch. “Would you stop _staring_ at me?”

“It’s just…strange.”

“Actually, it’s uncomfortable more than anything else,” he snapped, and considered the conversation closed. Ren, of course, could never stop worrying at a wound; he trailed after Hux for the two feet he managed before he turned back in utter disgust.

“Can I get you something for it?” he asked before Hux could demand he leave him alone, and the pure peculiarity of the question actually made him pause. It didn’t help that Ren appeared to actually mean it.

“No.”

Ren had never been good at accepting that as a non-negotiable answer. “Surely there’s _something_ you can take,” he insisted, one hand pushing back through his hair. He needed to cut it, and badly. Hux was already fantasising about first putting a blade to said hair and then the neck beneath it when Ren added, “To ease the symptoms, if not suppress them entirely.”

“Yes, but it’s wasteful.”

He did always rather enjoy boggling the other man. “ _How_?”

“Because it’s hardly going to kill me.” Of course that moment was exactly when his cough decided to return; much as he swallowed back on it, he dissolved into a short hacking fit. When he glanced up, the expression on Ren’s face suggested he had grown another head.

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“It’s part of it, you idiot. Sometimes it just makes my chest tight.” Regret had become far too familiar a sensation as of that; he snapped back with as much dignity as a hoarsened voice would allow, “Don’t _look_ at me like that. I had worse as a child, believe me.”

“You had lung spasms as a child?” His dark eyes, always too expressive for the madman’s own good, narrowed to perfect slits. The revelation there had Hux thinking murderous thoughts even before he voiced it aloud. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

Hux smiled. “You touch my tabac, and I’ll rip your balls off. With my teeth.” And, much as he’d prefer now _not_ to remember how particularly sensitive Ren was in that area, “I promise not even _you_ will enjoy that.”

He was ready to call it a victory and return to his bunk when the other man suddenly went very lax, his head hanging low like a child chastised. “Hux.”

Experience told Hux to walk away. Curiosity kept him there. Knowledge always had been his weakness. “This conversation is over, Ren,” he said, even as he himself made no attempt to remove himself from it. And then Ren stood before him, hands on his shoulders, nose to nose, mouth twisted and eyes wild.

Yet his voice was low, very flat. “I didn’t bring you here just to let you die.”

Pulling himself away so quick, he nearly fell, Hux spat back, “I’m not going to die!”

They’d had many an argument in the past, and so many of them had ended like this: two combatants, breathing hard, standing in impasse but feet from one another. And yet, Ren had never looked like this: miserable. Uncertain. _Afraid_.

“I know that,” he said, finally one hand tightening the damn towel again. And Hux swallowed, adjusting the satchel on his shoulder, and still didn’t move.

“Good.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, licked dry lips. “Then just let me be. Unless you return me to my ship, in which case, lead on.”

Ren appeared to curl in upon himself before Hux’s widening eyes. There might have been surprise, then, if not for the sudden coiled sense of disaster crawling up through his stomach and throat.

“Ren.”

The other man closed his eyes. “What?”

When he spoke again, his voice sounded alien, distant, something not entirely his own. Or perhaps something condemned to a past that was no longer able to be retrieved. “I want to go back to my ship.”

“You can’t.”

“Yes, I can.”

And Ren turned away, as if something had physically shoved at him. With hand over his mouth, words muffled, he should have been unintelligible – but then, that damned vocoder had taught Hux long ago how to listen to his voice.

Even as he wished now he couldn’t hear it at all.

“The _Finalizer_ is gone.”

On the fourth day, he’d gone climbing across a natural causeway that spanned one of the river’s smaller tributaries. A careless step, and he’d gone into the dammed waters. For the first moment, he’d been unable to breathe, unable to _move_ ; the ice-cold water had stabbed into every nerve ending, freezing him in indecision and paralysis. The same sensation now had him choking on the words before he finally forced them out.

“I – what?”

Ren straightened now to his full height, but the expression on his face – a child’s terrified realisation of how no adult could fix the wrongs they had done – reminded him of snow, of ash, of supernova explosion and bitter gall in his mouth. “The _Finalizer_ is gone,” Ren said, very flat, though his eyes were a chaotic ruin. “The drives went supercritical.”

Of course he asked, automatic even when it didn’t matter. “Which drives?”

And he only frowned, almost confused. “…all of them?”

This was not the first time he’d been brought news of this type. The fact that it came barely a standard week after said first did little to ease the shock of it, but then he looked down at the other man’s hands, large and empty, and remembered the saber. He hadn’t seen it since Starkiller. It had been for the best, he’d thought; the thing was unstable. Untrustworthy. It had only ever been destined to blow up in the hands of the fool who tried to wield it.

“Ren.” He had never felt so cold. “What did you _do_.”

And he sighed, face turned away. “What I had to.”

“You destroyed my _ship_?”

And then Ren’s hands were on him, fists bunched in his shirt, spittle hot against skin as he shouted directly into his face. “It wasn’t your ship!” And he was _laughing_ , eyes bright and damp and half-crazed, shaking him hard enough to clack teeth together. “That’s the point! It wasn’t _yours_ , it was never _yours_ , and even if you’d gone down with it they’d have wiped your name from the annals as a failed commander who deserved no more honour than the fool who helped him ruin everything he ever worked for!”

Just as suddenly as he’d erupted, Ren subsided. For his part Hux did not move at all. He only staring. And he said nothing, even as Ren’s hands withdrew, face long and pale and frightened in a way that seemed somehow both utterly alien to Kylo Ren, and yet entirely suited to the strange little creature that had created him in the first place.

“Hux—”

“Don’t.” He raised one hand, wiped it across his face. “Don’t you ever talk to me again.”

Out amongst the trees, he could hear the river bubbling over the tumble of rocks that made its ever-shifting bed. His nose ran too, no matter how many times he swiped at it with a handkerchief. Every time he blinked his eyes stung with fierce complaint; it didn’t help as he glanced up, wincing against the sun now cutting through the tall lines. How typical. The weather _would_ clear now, when all he wanted was rain and misery to underpin these unnecessary dramatics.

Eventually even he could no longer bully his legs into taking him any further. He sat down hard, not caring about the rock digging into uncomfortable places. It didn’t matter. The _Finalizer_ : gone. Her crew, likely gone down with it. Hux had felt a large chunk of his life slip out of his hands with Starkiller, but he’d still had the _Finalizer_. The ship had still been his. And now he’d lost it days ago, and not even known enough to mourn her.

Hux did not cry. He didn’t remember how.

But he sat very still, and very quiet, and did not move again for a very long time.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so: I clearly have no idea what I am doing, because when I thought of this story I figured it would be 20k, maybe 30k, tops. Then I wrote _this fucking 17k chapter_ and everything ended in tears. Honestly. [head in hands] I'm still surprised that people read the first chapter, so if you're still here at the end of this one, too: thank you. You're amazing. Thank you for coming along for the ride. I'm just horrified, because I've discovered that for some reason I'm fascinated by the idea of crawling inside Hux's head and seeing what happens. And he's a self-absorbed prick, you know. But there's still one more chapter left after this one. Hopefully he'll have learned to think of somebody besides himself before the end of that one.

Two standard weeks passed before he returned to the makeshift base. He did so mid-morning, and with no intention whatsoever of announcing his return. Not that he suspected such a thing to be necessary; he’d felt Ren’s probing more than once, out in the wilds. In the beginning he’d even purposefully gone further afield than he’d have considered advisable, just to see if he could get out of range. After two days of that game he’d dismissed it as an impractical waste of resources. It had still rankled, like the hole in his shoe he hadn’t quite managed to patch.

He was hunting through the storage crates for a new pair when he felt the shadow over him. He didn’t look up. It wasn’t as though he had to. Ren had always had a habit of turning up when unwanted, both aboard the _Finalizer_ and on Starkiller. It could almost have been comforting, that some things would obviously never change.

“You haven’t shaved.”

He wouldn’t have answered, if not for the affront in Ren’s voice. It was easier than laughing. “And?”

“I’ve never…” From the sound of his steps, the withdrawing of his shadow, Ren had actually retreated. Hux might have grown a beard long ago if he’d been aware it could have such power. “…I didn’t think you would like a beard.”

“Well no. I don’t like it.” Finally he emerged with the twin to the other shoe he’d found sometime earlier; trust Ren not to manage to pack even shoes in their correct pairs. As he set it down neatly beside the other, he added carelessly, “But sometimes these things happen.”

Hux didn’t need to look at him to imagine the state of his expression; from the struggling rise and fall of his voice, it would prove to be a twisted mess of confusion and irritation. “There are supplies—”

“Which I have no intention of wasting.” And now he flowed to his feet, turning to face Ren with arms crossed over his chest and eyes very cold. Hux did not require a uniform to don the dignitas of a commanding general. “Unless you plan on telling me exactly the logistics behind replenishing them?”

Ren answered only with silence. With a roll of his eyes, Hux dipped down again, moving on to the next box. The split in his focus still burned. It had been a mistake, to look at Ren. Their two weeks of separation hadn’t done him much physical harm – he appeared to be feeding himself, at least – but the purple-black shadows under his eyes were new. And his dark eyes, always too expressive for their own good, appeared even larger against the ruined canvas of his translucent skin.

“Your hair is longer.”

Of course Ren would continue to volunteer information both useless and already known. “And your point would be?”

“Using the scissors isn’t wasting a resource. I can sharpen them easily enough.”

“I really don’t trust you around sharp objects, Ren.” And before the odd exchange could degenerate into an outright argument, he slapped his hand down on the crate, the sound crisp and clear as blastershot. “And I’m busy.”

But then Ren had never known how to take a hint. “Doing what?”

In all truth, he was actually looking for more antihistamines, not that he planned on explaining that to Ren. “Why do you care?” he asked instead, hearing the childish tone in his voice and hating it. He’d hoped Ren wouldn’t be in. In those five days before his confession, he’d rarely frequented the cabin during daylight hours. But then, whatever else could be said of Kylo Ren, he’d never been the type to back down from foolish confrontation.

“Because I brought you here,” Ren said, eventually; he almost sounded bewildered. Hux supposed being brought up amongst the Resistance could do that to a person. While he was himself perfectly familiar with responsibility, they tended to have peculiar ideas indeed about the degree of accountability one person could be fairly expected to have for another individual.

Hux didn’t look up again. But though he stayed on his knees, eyes downturned, his voice burned with dark authority. “And you blew up my ship.” And he chuckled, cutting and coarse, and shifted a mass of tins with far more force than necessary. “Forgive me if that doesn’t really impress me overly.”

He’d hoped the comment and its delivery would send Ren into a mute state of guilt, or at the very least he’d be so long formulating an answer Hux would have time to escape. The flat calmness of his words proved an unpleasant surprise. “We need to talk about that.”

“No.”

“Hux.”

How he wanted to laugh, again. But then laughter had never come easily to him, and he certainly found precious little amusing these days – aside from the fact that his life had collapsed in so spectacular a fashion in so very short a time. Had it really only been a matter of standard weeks, since he had stood before his troops and watched as his greatest triumph lit up an entire disintegrating system?

“How many times have I demanded that we speak on some fundamental matter, and been completely ignored?” He didn’t wait for Ren’s input, knowing the man wouldn’t recognise a rhetorical question if it up and swallowed him whole. And instead he added, “I think it’s my turn to behave like a child and refuse to do things any sane and rational adult would realise aren’t optional.”

The answer came low, surprisingly even. “You’re better than that.”

Any surprise he might have felt at such a well-expressed sentiment, Hux shoved deep beneath his usual veneer of acid snark. “Trust me, Ren – flattery will get you nowhere.”

“Hux.”

“I’ve already made my feelings clear.”

To his credit, Ren actually kept his mouth shut for more than ten seconds. It didn’t make much of a difference to Hux, who would have continued to ignore him either way. He had found what he was hunting for, anyway; as it emerged from the box, Hux hefted it high, triumphantly brandishing the thing by its fine and smooth neck.

Ren’s brow was a tangle of concern and disbelief. “What are you doing with that?”

“Nothing that need concern you.”

“ _Hux_.”

The way Ren kept repeating his name had by now crawled under his skin, festering there like some foreign mass filled with bile and pus. Curling his lips, fixing his cold eyes upon the other man, he nonetheless spoke in a manner both detached and utterly professional.

“There’s something missing from you, Ren.”

It might have been another shot from a bowcaster, taking him low in the gut; Ren stopped dead. Those damnable eyes widened, mouth half-open, staring at him as though he’d seen a ghost. And Hux smiled, humourless and ice-riddled, remembering a journey taken but weeks ago. He had sat upon a stiff seat, tacky with blood, Ren a crumpled mess before him as the shuttle had shuddered and shrieked, desperately trying to escape the gravity of dying Starkiller so it could make the jump to hyperspace.

_I killed him_ , Ren had said, in the snow and blood. _I killed him, and it changed nothing. My father is dead and I killed him and still I failed_.

They’d never spoken of it again. Hux had never seen the need. And yet the question spilled from him now, honey-sweet and so very easily wrought.

“Do you even regret what you did?”

Those wide open eyes shuttered closed in one abrupt second. The ugliness of the dark look now painted haphazard across his features rather suited their clumsy construction. “So says the man who destroyed the Hosnian System and then slept like a baby afterwards. Ask me how I know.”

“Because you let me fuck you beforehand. Twice. And then begged and begged until I let you suck my cock.” And only a decade’s worse of relentless indoctrination stilled his hand, prevents him from hurling the heavy glass bottle right at Ren’s damned head. “So don’t get on your high horse with me, _Lord_ Ren. We’re both the irredeemable bastard here.” Now he turned on one heel, towards the thankfully open door. But he still had one parting shot left to fire. And his aim had always been very true. “But the difference is, I don’t ever try to pretend otherwise. I don’t expect to be forgiven for what I chose to do. I did it because it was necessary.”

The shift of him was volcanic, his entire over-sized frame trembling as if on the verge of explosion. “It _was_ necessary!”

“But you don’t believe that.” And he smiled, tilted the bottle in mocking toast. “No more than you can convince yourself that Han Solo really deserved to die by his wayward son’s wavering hand.”

Ren had gone very still. There was no way to know if turning his back on him would be the last thing Hux ever did. He did it anyway. And then, he was away and into the forest, Corellian brandy in hand, satchel over his hip, and somewhat new shoes on his aching feet.

Even without the argument with Ren, there would not have been enough hours of daylight left to reach his destination. With resignation, Hux curled up beneath a tree, deep in the mossy hollow with his survival blanket cocooned tightly about his shivering body. The faint scent of some small animal bit into his nostrils, musky and rich. He heard them, sometimes; still he had never seen one. With a crooked grin, halfway to sleep, he supposed they knew better than to cross the path of someone who would find them most interesting when skewered over a cooking fire.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t kept himself hydrated and fed. The survival skills of the academy had been lessons well and bitterly learned. Only the damn allergies had really pissed him off; he’d long since given in to the medication he’d swiped when he’d originally returned to the cabin on the first time. It had been but a brief detour to gather the essentials before he’d struck out across the forest.

He had walked for hours, that first day, well beyond the borders of any previous exploration – and this was no widening spiral of mapped territory. He’d cut a straight trail, not caring for where it might take him. Its terminus had been sudden: a rocky outcrop whose sharp edge supported a generous waterfall, falling into a churning cauldron which drained into the lake below.

Forced to this ending, Hux had sat there for a night, watching the sky. A strange aurora had stretched across its unfamiliar plains, almost from end to end. He didn’t quite know enough about his position to say why, but it had curled his gut somehow, aching and unnerving: an instinctive sense of wrongness. Whether it was something to do with latitude or magnetosphere, he could not say. But it was a thing that should not be, arrayed before him with dizzying disregard for the proper order of the universe.

And yet, even he could not deny its beauty; it lay as a curtain of colour, gauzy and ephemeral, over the pinhole stars behind. At his height, upon such an edge, it seemed close enough that he felt he could reach forward, press it aside, look behind the veil. He didn’t remember sleeping. He’d just woken in the morning on the rock, cold and stiff, a small tongue licking his hand. He’d jerked to immediate awareness, and still found the native creature long gone when he’d looked for it.

But he had accepted the end of his walk. And there, Hux had begun to build. It had been only a half-formed thought at first. But the more stones he had collected, the more of a shape it had begun to take. Long and triangular, tapering and sleek; she formed an arrowhead, cutting through the stars that lay arrayed before her when night fell again. He’d sat there, silent and still beside the meagre beginnings of the construct and watched again as the aurora rippled across unfamiliar skies. A second viewing gave him no further idea of what lurked behind its fluttering unnatural light.

The project grew with each day. It had become far larger than expected, going through several enlargements until he just stopped counting. Then, again without true conscious thought, he had set about making a tributary of the river. With makeshift tools, their construction careful and remembered from years long past, Hux directed it around the stone cairn’s starboard side. With the river itself to port, it left her surrounded by water, the two diverging at the apex; the end of the triangle was the bridge between the two, arching over the void to space beyond.

He had always taken solace in mindless small feats of engineering. It was remembered days of the academy; basic learning by rote, while true experience and knowledge came to him only by trial and error.

As he returned now, he felt a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the ridiculous degree of physical exertion he had indulged in recently. That didn’t matter at all. What _did_ matter was that all remained the same; the flowing water, her pointed stern cutting out to the sky. This _Finalizer_ would never rise. But he would give her ashes in which to rest.

The kindling, cut from the trees some distance back from the outcrop, had already been built up around the base. He’d prepared almost everything to perfection before returning to the cabin. With an easy leap over the small creek he had dug, he began a slow and thorough inspection of his work – as meticulous in execution as any actual inspection he’d made of the true ship. The timing was perfect; as the encroaching darkness came down upon them all, he found himself with hands folded at the small of his back, feet faintly apart and back ramrod straight, simply staring at her.

Hux had never known actual friendship, he supposed. At least, not in the way it was spoken of in holo-movies and pulp novels. But then, there were those aboard the First Order’s flagship who would have come close, had he considered them in such a light. It was his ship, his command; he had purposefully surrounded himself with those who were a pleasing combination of talent and loyalty. He’d also appreciated most those who were ruthless, but without undue ambition. It was far more palatable to have staff who attributed their own success to his, and would not seek to dethrone him when their fates were so closely entwined with his own.

And now, every one of them: cast apart. Mere atoms, upon the void. And here stood Hux himself, stranded and alone, the unlikely last companion of a Force user gone quite, quite mad.

Stooping forward, he reclaimed the bottle, now opened; without even savouring the rich scent, he indulged himself in a long drink. He kept his eyes open as he tilted his head back, fixed upon the stars as they emerged from behind the darkening sky.

The dropping veil of the aurora felt to him tonight as a shroud, light as lace and just as delicate in form. It should not have come every night. And yet, it did. He sighed, looked to the river. The rush of the water had dulled his thoughts before, lulling him to dreamless sleep. But it did not now; his mind was a chaos of twisting, churning thought, lit up in the brilliance of that damned aurora.

Perhaps it was because he recalled seeing him last, but it was the memory of Mitaka which came first: his terrified relief at the news Kylo Ren would be leaving them. How little he had understood. And the brandy burned on his tongue as he drank to Phasma, remembering her somewhere in the great bowels of the ship, a commanding presence at the head of her Stormtroopers. She had always been upright and brilliant, a presence as strong and shimmering as the high polish of her armour. In her he had a strong ally lost, one who would not be found again elsewhere. And then there were yet a half-dozen others, imperative to his command, given over to waste and chaos.

When he turned again to the facsimile of his lost ship, he lost his footing; dizzied, wavering, barely unable to keep himself upright. But he had hardly had a decent drink. The bottle was yet almost full. With the flick of the thumb on his other hand, the sparker burst into fierce small life. He tossed the entire unit to the kindling; no need to mourn its loss. It could be replaced. And the wood blazed up, dry and hungry, sparks leaping frantic into the sky. Hux knew he stood too close; the heat upon his face burned with cleansing clarity, the bottle hanging now half-forgotten at his side.

It would be so easy, to climb onto the cairn shaped in the likeness of his lost ship. There, Hux could lie down on the stones and allow it to become his pyre.

He took another swig. And then the bottle, twisting end on end, cut an arc across an alien sky, the little liquid that escaped an amber rain. His unerring eye took it into the heart of the blazing pyre. A _whoosh_ of ignition, the sweet scent of burning alcohol, and he had christened his little stone ship on her maiden and only voyage.

Only then did Hux turn away. Seated upon the edge, he did not close his eyes. The heat on his back, the crackling whisper of the blaze, relentlessly reminded him of what he had lost as he stared out across the cold lake. The laughing aurora held true before him, gentle and beckoning, every rippling wave a coy offering of a glance to the darkness beneath the kaleidoscope of colour.

Hux did not move. He only watched as his tribute to the _Finalizer_ and her dead crew went up in ash behind him.

 

*****

 

He returned the next day, very late and very tired. As he came into the clearing he could hear the familiar tones of an argument. Frowning, he slowed his step, cocking his head; it did not change the fact that he was correct. Raised voices cut through the clear fresh air – or a raised _voice_ , at least. Ren was shouting at someone. And even that alone sounded most peculiar, given Hux had generally only heard his voice modulated by the mask when raised in that way. And even then Ren preferred to frame his threats in a fashion low and menacing; by the time he progressed to blind rage, he usually let the lightsaber do all the talking instead.

He’d not once seen a comms device anywhere but in the ruined ship – but from the way Ren shouted, he doubted it was directed through any conventional means of communication. Creeping forward, he indulged himself in a scowl; he couldn’t understand a word Ren was saying. He wasn’t even entirely sure what language Ren spoke in. A dead one, likely enough. Ren’s ridiculous command of languages had always irritated him; it didn’t sit well with the way he preferred to think of Ren as being intellectually far inferior to himself.

And whoever he was yelling at was certainly not present. Standing some feet from him, arms folded across his chest, Hux watched as Ren gesticulated wildly at thin air and wondered if madness was in anyway contagious.

“Ren?”

It startled him to silence. And then he turned, a hunted look upon his long features; his hair was a wild corona about too-pale skin, lips reddened and chapped, eyes very wide. They skipped sideways, back to the spot of dead air he’d been arguing with. Then they returned to Hux, those generous lips thinning.

His next movement was unexpected; within a moment he stood before Hux, hands digging into slim shoulders, actually shaking him like a berated child. Hux pulled back, scowl vicious and warning, but Ren’s fingers dug so deep Hux could feel the bite of his ragged nails even through the thick wool of his sweater.

“What did you _do_?”

He blinked once, thrust his chin imperiously high. “What are you talking about?”

“The _fire_. What was that?”

“None of your business, that’s what.” There must have been something unintended in his eyes, or perhaps upon the surface of his thoughts; most times, Hux loathed the voyeuristic way Ren could just skim emotion and intent from the surface of his own mind. But something made Ren frown, loosening his grip. Without waiting for any second wind, Hux ducked up from beneath Ren’s hands and put a good few metres between them before speaking again. “Who the hell were you talking to?”

Ren still hadn’t lowered his hands. He looked ridiculous. To Hux’s mind, that was just situation normal. “What?”

“You were talking to someone.” How he managed to actual say the words with any degree of patience, Hux had no idea. His shoulders ached abominably already. “I thought we were the only people on this hell planetoid.”

And now he chose to be sly, pursing his lips, eyes narrowing. “I never said that.”

Hux opened his mouth. Then he closed it. It was true. It didn’t lessen the urge to kick him.

“So who _was_ it?” he asked, knowing when to let a surrender pass without undue fuss. Ren just turned away, one hand waving in clumsy dismissal.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Hux raised his voice, just enough for it to cut between them like a thrown knife; the skills of an orator had always come naturally to him. “And if I would like to talk to this person? You know, have a little variety in my conversational partners besides the person who blew up my ship and all my staff?”

Though he had stopped, Ren did not turn around; Hux could speak only to the man’s broad back, hunched forward in the dark shirt that pulled too tight across the muscular set of arms and flank. “You couldn’t talk to him.” The first words were muttered; his voice rose on the next, cold and yet somehow helpless. “And I mean that. You _can’t_.”

“Oh, is this all some Force nonsense, then?”

The flatness allowed no argument. “Yes.”

Hux closed his eyes, again. This time he counted to ten before he opened them. The urge to murder didn’t lessen whatsoever in that time. “Excellent,” he said, very pleasantly. “I’m trapped on a planetoid with a madman who is now making up imaginary friends to talk to just because I’m rightfully ignoring him for mass-murder and high-level kidnapping.”

“Both of which _you’ve_ done yourself.”

“Yes, but generally I try to minimise the suffering of the subject.”

Again Ren pursed his lips, that ugly little twist that did nothing whatsoever for the naturally awkward amalgamation of his features. Though apparently he had decided that _that_ argument was one for another day, because when he spoke again, his tone proved almost conversational. “And he’s not imaginary.”

Hux never could resist poking the sleeping bantha. “Are you sure about that?”

“Yes!” he shouted, abrupt and sudden, eyes flashing; almost immediately he pulled back within himself, as if someone unseen had told him to. Hux frowned, but could see nothing to suggest the presence of anyone save Ren and himself. And then, he shook his head.

“No. No, I just don’t believe you.”

Ren snorted, face half-turned to shadow as he looked away. “You have to.”

“Actually, no. I don’t.” And he glanced towards the cabin, mind already cast back to the list of a thousand tasks and needful items. “I have things to do.”

“Like what?”

The scepticism there might have annoyed him, had he not actually had the germinating idea already firmly in mind. “I’ll find something.”

The way Ren trailed him inside reminded Hux of unwelcome duplicate shadows, the curse of binary star systems. “Does it involve setting more things on fire?” he demanded, voice ugly with the desire for proper argument. One with teeth and blood and broken things.

“No.” Hux firmly kept his back to him, going immediately to the crate he knew contained most of the tools Ren had brought. “No, I think I’m done with that.”

And now Ren’s voice turned uncertain; Hux couldn’t blame him. Things tended to be easier between them, when they were fighting. “Are you going to stay, then?”

“I _am_ tired of sleeping under trees.” He spun around then, a laser wrench held firmly in hand. “But if I catch you within two feet of my door—”

“You’ll eviscerate me and then wrap my lower colon around my neck until I choke and die?”

Hux blinked, just once. And then, again. “…that’s…not what I was thinking of, but it has merit. Very good, Ren. I’ll file that one away for future reference.”

The great idiot very nearly smiled. Then he rolled his eyes and looked away. As he pushed up from his knees, Hux could not resist one last parting shot.

“And please don’t argue with your imaginary friend when I’m trying to sleep.”

Predictably, Ren lit up like a star system hit by Starkiller’s full force. “He’s not imaginary!”

“Then who is he?”

So quick he turned mutinous, lips pressed together like a toddler refusing his vegetables. Hux rolled his eyes, glanced towards the bedrooms. Ren had better have not snuck the bigger one while he was out trekking through the forest. “I’m going to sleep.”

“It’s morning.”

Hux turned back, smile sunny and promising that earlier-discussed evisceration. “And?”

“And I’ve never seen you go to sleep in the morning.”

That had a scowl prickling at the corners of his mouth, though Hux chose instead to keep his expression very even, and very flat. “You don’t know me.”

“I do.”

Such casual assurance had Hux walking forward, each step measured and parade-perfect, until they stood nose to nose. Ren did not look away. Hux met his eyes, just as he had intended. “No. You don’t.” And he smiled, all teeth and terrible truth. “I’m here because you’re forcing me to be here, Ren. That’s the only reason. We’re not friends. We’re people who used to work together until you destroyed both places where we performed said work.”

Ren blinked, but did not look away. “And we fucked.”

“There are biological drives that must be met.” And he turned away, voice light as ice, fury as deep and hidden as the underside of a drifting iceberg. “Good morning, Ren.”

It had turned to late afternoon by the time he emerged again. There was no sign of Ren at all. He had to tell himself with sharp annoyance to ignore the faint twinge this brought; while he felt no concern for Ren himself, he had become accustomed to being bothered by him. He told himself he didn’t miss it, and returned to his room to gather some essentials.

Down at the lake, Hux indulged himself with a long bath in cool waters. He overdid it by intention, shivering inside the thick oversized clothing as he came back up to the cabin. No fire had been set in the blackened pit, and Ren himself remained absent. Hux made himself a meal of the rations that most appealed to his own tastes and saved none at all for anyone else.

He stood outside to eat it. The entire time he told himself he wasn’t watching, wasn’t waiting. The aurora could not be seen from down here; he had the suspicion it would have been very dull and disinteresting even if he could have. Later, he retrieved one of the datapads, not surprised to see not a one had any communicative abilities. They were still loaded with holomovies and various books. He ended up taking several into his room. It would be something to do, until he wanted to go out in that damn forest again.

And he sneezed, then scowled. Yes. A break from the outside might be warranted, at least for the rest of the day.

 

*****

 

A large part of Hux’s training at the academy had involved the perfection of moderation. It was perfectly acceptable to enjoy one’s work, but it was not to become a source of outright and unseemly pleasure. Hux had generally succeeded in that respect.

And then he was given his first blaster and he knew he was doomed forever to failure.

In truth he had little interest in taking the thing out and shooting other people with it. That tended to end in mess and disorder, and he bothered with it only when there were other people to clean it up.

From the very beginning Hux had instead preferred the simulations designed to first teach and then perfect. He’d won an obscene number of accolades in target shooting, to the point where they’d been whispers of nepotism and tampered results. Judiciously applied talent had silenced most of those rumours. He’d enjoyed _that_ far beyond acceptable levels, too.

Later, there had even been a degree of sniper training, though the fact he would be pushed through to the officer’s school meant he’d have little practical use for it. Hux didn’t care. He took perfect marks and revelled in it, even though Hux realised he’d long ago failed on the most important front.

He still took far too much pleasure in having a gun in his hands. It had been almost a pity, back on Starkiller, when it had fired. He’d had to give the speech, had had to be in front of his arrayed troops and officers as the red death had streaked across the sky. It had been an opened hand, five reaching fingers of fire that he’d closed in a fist until all had been crushed to dust and ash. Of course he’d enjoyed that. But in reality he’d much preferred to be before one of the great viewports aboard the _Finalizer_ , utterly naked, hands against the glass and Kylo Ren’s mouth around his cock.

In avoiding Ren here, Hux had found something else to build. While more ambitious than the funeral pyre, the planetoid seemed littered with appropriate salvage. The more he collected, the harder it became to say why that might be; unlike that sandblasted hellhole Jakku, where so many things had started to go wrong for them all, no battle had been fought here. This planetoid was no graveyard of imperial command. It was just a stupid little rock held together by the Force and dotted with odd treasures that were worthless to anyone except an extremely bored ex-general of the First Order.

But it kept him amused. And he enjoyed it. And much as he spent his nights in the little cot in his room, knowing Ren slept next door, wishing he had the sense to just go one door over and smother the gangling idiot in his sleep, he never did. He waited for the light, and then returned to his project.

The strange conversation outside the cabin hadn’t done much to blunt the ragged edges of their broken relationship. Hux also still had no real idea of what Ren did with his time. It could assumed he trained for long hours, given his body remained hard and muscular. Hux knew that from the few times he saw him in the lake; wet and naked and glistening, water in rivulets down the sculpted muscle of chest and abdomen.

Hux usually walked away from those silent encounters at half-mast, forced to go take care of himself elsewhere. Every incident was tinted at fury with himself for such weakness, though it had been a feature of his life long before he and Ren had actually gotten around to regularly fucking each other’s brains out. It was simply an unfortunate fact of the universe that Kylo Ren was almost entirely Hux’s type. The personality could have used a complete replacement, but one look at the hard planes of his stomach and the curving thick muscles of his thighs, and Hux was lost.

He wasn’t thinking of that now. But his stomach still coiled as it might in the throes of sexual excitement. One hand moved now with proprietary glee over the long shaft, directing its length over the valley. The smile upon his lips felt too big for his face, as if it might tear his skin open and reveal the demon beneath, even as he mouthed the single word that mattered most: _fire_.

He was working on reloading when something crashed through the forest at his side. It jittered to an ungraceful half about two feet away, breathing hard, fury radiating from the dark form in cascading amplifying waves. Hux didn’t even look up. He himself couldn’t decide if the gnawing in his own stomach was more anger or irritation that his secret was out. Not that it could have lasted. But it was the principle of the thing.

“What the _fuck_ is that.”

Hux adjusted a dangling wire, tucking it neatly back behind one of the boards he’d salvaged from some unidentifiable wreck of a puddle jumper. “It’s a cannon.”

Ren still wasn’t speaking in questions when he said, “Where did you get it.”

“Oh, all around.”

The airy answer couldn’t have worked any better; Ren spluttered for a good ten seconds in what sounded suspiciously like Shyriiwook before he finally managed a strangled, “ _What_?”

“I _built_ it, you idiot.”

That shut him up so very satisfactorily Hux actually wondered if Ren had turned around and just left altogether. Humming to himself, he continued about the work of adjusting the cannon’s deeply shielded oscillator, and found himself genuinely surprised when Ren spoke again.

“How – how do _you_ know how to build a cannon?”

“If you recall, I am very well-versed in theoreticals. And I realised I could theoretically build a cannon. And I had nothing better to do with my time, so I built a cannon. From theory.”

He’d spoken in as level a voice as possible; it had been the kind of answer he’d had reserved for an academy tutor assessing some practical project. In return, Ren’s voice just spiralled high and disbelieving. It could have been amusing, if not for the actual situation. “You know, I brought _books_. A lot of _books_. All easily accessible from a datapad. You could have just read, like a _normal_ person.”

A sharp edge caught him hard and sudden, withdrawing the finger, Hux held it up to the light, squinted as a fat drop of dark blood began to pool in the ragged edge. “Put me in a normal situation and perhaps I’ll behave like one.”

“I – wait.” The dark eyes followed as Hux withdrew his hand, slipping the long finger between his lips. The perfect dawning horror upon his scarred blunt features was a beautiful thing. “Is this what it was like for you? With me? On the _Finalizer_?”

Hux blinked. And then, he began to suck. A high flush was gathering upon Ren’s pale cheeks, splotchy and harsh.

“Is this revenge for that?”

Hus withdrew his finger with a lascivious _pop_ , and smiled. “Oh, no. Not at all.” And already it was bleeding again; he dragged it along the scrapmetal patchwork of the cannon’s casing, a streak of blood and spit. “This is just for the kidnapping. I haven’t decided what to do about every other thing you’ve done to ruin my life. Including the _Finalizer_ and her crew.” And then he wasn’t smiling at all. “That will require something far more complicated and far-ranging.”

Ren’s eyes had fixed now upon the valley, on the crater down low that smoked faintly, long tendrils reaching to the grey skies above. “I think you’ve got a pretty good range already.”

Fetching a clean handkerchief for his finger, Hux screwed up his nose and lips, then shook his head. “It could be better.”

It came out so normal, so pedestrian, that it seemed as if Hux had punched Ren. The other man sat down abruptly in the dirt beside the cannon, hair over his face, head shaking wildly. “I think you’ve gone crazy.”

“Well,” Hux said, all practicality as he climbed down from the running board, “it would be your own fault.”

But Ren appeared serious – or at least as serious as he was capable of getting. The too-large eyes had fixed on him, very still and very grave when he demanded, “ _Have_ you gone crazy?”

Hux smiled. “I think the most basic criteria is that I must believe myself perfectly sane.”

“So do you?”

With a snort, he looked back to his cannon; despite her dull materials, she still gleamed in the late afternoon light. “I don’t think it matters.” And then he returned to his satchel, and began hunting for the small medkit he always carried. The smile he wore held no humour as he hefted it high, giving Ren an arch look with the sun at his back. “After all, who’d notice another madman around here?”

Hux knew Ren had fallen into a fierce sulk even before he left. He paid it no heed, bacta-patching his finger before returning to the cannon. After another successful test fire left him half-hard in his trousers, he considered a break, a cigarette, a long slow wank in the dying light of late afternoon.

Then, an unexpected sound had him snatching his hand back from its lazy pass over his clothed crotch, the injured finger throbbing as he clenched it to a fist. Something had broken atmosphere, and very close to where he currently stood. He could hear it still, and his mind moved to immediate tactical mode.

He had no other weapon than the unwieldy cannon. He stood at its side now, hands clenched, mind clear and focused as he flicked through all options and scenarios. It wasn’t the command shuttle. Even Ren, with all his crazy powers, couldn’t have put that thing back into controlled flight. A guest? Unlikely. A supply drop? Or perhaps Snoke had located them. His gut curled in cold clench, withering in upon itself. As its trajectory traced lower, he could begin to see details of the shuttle’s grim hull. Whatever else it was, by manufacture or maintenance, it was certainly no First Order craft.

The Knights of Ren, perhaps. The ugly thought knifed through his already tangled gut, cold and efficient. Ren had been named their master, but to Hux’s understanding the creatures had been bred loyal to Snoke. Mysticism and magic quite aside, he could not imagine they would take Kylo Ren’s defection at all well.

Keeping to the shadows, Hux moved back into the cool gloom of the forest, keeping away from the vague trail he had already made. Leaving the cannon gave him a prickling, naked sensation, though in reality its range was nowhere near useful when it came to atmospheric craft. Even then would it was unlikely to have the firepower required to take a ship down, unless aimed exceptionally well. And despite his skills as a sniper, learned so long ago, it wasn’t really designed for such fine work.

He still fiercely wished he’d decided to construct some sort of sidearm. But the cannon had amused him more, and though he was more than familiar with the structure of the weapons he had favoured at the academy, he had no typical power sources to hand. But it was all excuses now; he knew perfectly well that he could have salvaged something from the command shuttle. And he resolved to do so. Later.

The cabin appeared undisturbed from this distance. That could mean very little in the greater scheme of things. Hux could make out no sign of Ren, which was a conundrum at the best of times. There was little chance Ren would be unaware of somebody else so close to them, if indeed he was not the one who had invited them in the first place.

For the first time Hux genuinely regretted that he had no idea what Ren did all day, save for talk to imaginary friends and swing his saber around. Taking a shallow breath, he fixed his eyes upon the closed door. There were no firearms of any sort of in the cabin – he had mentioned as much to Ren very early on, got a pointed demonstration of the saber for his trouble, and had remained annoyed about it ever since – but there were knives. While certainly not his preferred weapon, if he found himself in close quarters and needing to engage, it was better than nothing.

Circling around, Hux crept closer to the back; climbing in through one of the small windows would possibly present himself as less of a target. And then a low snarl escaped, barely breathed. A stocky man, bundled in mismatched clothing, had entered the clearing. Armed with at least three weapons, he scowled around at his surroundings. The flight goggles he wore pushed up over a bald pate flashed in the setting sunlight, a large moustache overcompensating for the lack of hair above. The unremarkable face had been scarred, both by violence and ultraviolet light. A smuggler of some sort, Hux deduced. He could have been making a drop for Ren, but by the aura and his expression of frank surprise at the sight of the cabin, Hux doubted it.

“Well.” The sour breath beside his ear burned like acid. “What do we got here?”

He had no time to react. One arm was shoved violent and straight up behind his back, pulling hard on the sheathed socket of his shoulder. The other hand came around the base of his throat, digging fat strong fingers into his collarbone; he could feel it strain and stretch beneath the force of it. His natural instinct had him pressing back and up from his heels, trying to thrust up the other shoulder into the man’s jaw. It did little; his captor, while unseen, was a broad man. Taller and stronger than Hux, more so than even Ren. Hux had plenty of experience and training in various grappling forms of combat, but this man was a wall of solid muscle, and had pinned his free arm hard against his already aching side.

And now the other man, stocky and sly, glanced up with vague interest as the giant forced him from the forest and into the clearing. “Huh,” he said, and the too-light eyes, the colour of rancid milk, raked up and down Hux’s struggling form. “Doesn’t look like much of a Jedi to me.”

“It don’t matter.” Again, that hot breath against his skin, alcohol cured in a circulatory system that held very little actual blood of its own. “Maybe he’s just a pretty bird, flown his cage.”

Hux had gone still, his words icy command. “Take your hands from me.”

“Or what?” he chuckled. “You’ll scream?” The hand over his shoulder and throat tightened; its thumb made a small circular motion, curious and hard. “Perhaps I like it, when you scream.”

The fierce scowl he wore should have cut through the hull of a destroyer. But Hux had no answer, and knew he didn’t need one. The familiar flicker and hiss of a lightsaber’s activation spoke for itself. The sound usually sent a tremor of irritation down his spine; he had seen the evidence of its destructive power visited far too many times upon his own ship to really appreciate its presence. But something close to vicious pleasure curled low in his stomach now. Already he could scent burning flesh, and bitter joy settled like ash upon his tongue.

And Stocky turned, squinting against the light. “Oh, maybe we had it wrong. You’re just the houseboy.” And he snickered, unconcerned and casual as a man about his marker. “ _He’s_ the Jedi.”

Ren emerged from his favoured shadows: a casual beast, stalking across the clearing with clear intent. Any sane man would have taken at least a step backward, recognising an apex predator when one was displayed before them. Stocky simply raised a blaster with casual skill and aimed it at Ren’s dark head.

Hux watched, eyes narrowed, focused despite the growing pain in the awkward twist of shoulder and elbow. The fingers of that hand, thankfully his non-dominant, had tingled from the beginning, were by now already going numb. But the stocky man had a steady hand, a sharp eye. Many smugglers were useless in close combat, preferring showy distraction as a cover to run. From the strength of the unseen man behind him, and the easy calm of the man before him, and even with Ren amongst them both, Hux calculated these two were nothing to underestimate.

Ren’s lip rose in snarling scorn as he looked down the barrel of Stocky’s chosen weapon. “You can’t shoot me with that.”

“Why? Because you’re some Jedi on a pilgrimage?”

The shot rang out the moment Stocky finished his sentence. Ren’s hand thrust out, fingers in harsh curl, arm moving in a brutal push to one side. The blaster shot droned directly past his ear all the same. As the furious eyes opened to wide and fleeting surprise, the stocky man smiled, displaying surprisingly straight and white teeth.

“We’ve been here before. Plenty of interesting salvage, you see.” And he laughed, clear and simple even as he shifted the blaster’s aim to the centre of Ren’s still face. “But the tourists get snippy.” His free hand tapped low at the hollow of his throat; beneath the fabric of his clothing, a dull metallic echo. “We can work around that.”

Very slowly, eyes narrowed now, Ren lowered the saber. But it blazed on, humming and popping. Wary, his attention half-fixed on Stocky, he glanced over to Hux, who just glared and said not a word.

“Worried about your friend?” Still Stocky followed Ren with what Hux suspected was an aim to rival his own, milky eyes sharp and knowing. “Probably should be. Harsat isn’t much of a gentleman, and it’s been a while since he had something soft and willing to put his cock into.”

“I don’t think you’ll find my companion is either of those things.”

A rumbling laugh bubbled up behind him, the giant’s voice heavily accented and slow about the words. “So much the better.”

By now Hux had accepted there to be no point in struggling. Instead he tried a second course of action, staring at Ren, willing him to say something to his mind. But whatever the stocky man was apparently doing to suppress Ren’s access to the Force, it shut them both out. And then a barrel pushed against his temple and for one dark and cold moment Hux thought of nothing at all.

“Now,” the man said, quite pleasant. He has a strangely melodious voice, in fact, though the accent was beyond even Hux’s experience. “We see you have some choice gear here. We’re taking it. And you’d best just stand there and let me make my selections, otherwise Harsat here will be putting a hole in the ginger’s head.” And then he rolled his eyes, disgust and amusement warring across the weathered features. “And he usually only has one use for nice warm holes, I’ll let you know.”

“And oh, you are a pretty one.” The kiss to Hux’s neck half-choked him with the scent of smoke and sour mash alone. Scowling, he glanced up, saw Ren all but vibrating with rage. With a sigh, he decided to do something before Ren killed absolutely everybody. Including themselves.

“Yes, I suppose I am rather pretty,” Hux said, and smiled. Then turned his head and bit down hard. As the great hands reflexively spasmed, Hux reared back before the man even had a chance to scream. And then he couldn’t; his horrified shriek gurgled out in a mangled rush, along with gouting thick arterial blood.

The roar of the giant’s companion then had Hux ducking low, turning on one foot as the other shot out to stabilise his stance. The sound cut off a second later; Hux had taken the gun and put a round straight through his left eyes. Ren, saber raised, face in a ruined rictus of fury, froze. It was a long moment before he deactivated the damn thing, standing silent before the nearly headless body of Stocky. Hux, still pointed the blaster, chest heaving, shoulder on fire.

“He’s dead.”

“Yes.” Hux lowered the weapon. Yet he could not stop staring. The utter bloody ruin of Stocky Man’s face rendered him anonymous. Hux had no name, even, for this man with no face. It should have been enough to leave him only as a piece of meat on some backwater planet useful only to smugglers and failed Jedi. But still he burned with an easy flowing hatred that didn’t feel satiated. Hux wanted to do more.

A hand, heavy, came to rest upon his uninjured shoulder. Hux shook it off, even as it struck him that it had not been restraining. It had been for reassurance – and not his own.

And when he turned he found Ren, the lightsaber’s gleaming hilt limp in one hand, face long and troubled. “He could have killed you.”

“Not likely,” Hux said, trite and with his upper lip curled in high disgust. Perhaps it was only inevitable that Ren’s temper would rise again, his sudden shout the bright explosion of a star gone willingly supernova.

“Yes, it would have been very likely! You should have left it to me!”

The blaster took easy aim at the broad target of his chest. “Shut up, Ren.”

His eyes flared, ugly and hungry both. “Or what? You’ll kill me too?”

“Stay there. Or I kriffing will.” But Hux could not hold him there. He did not need to. Instead he turned, and he ran. Much as he hadn’t cared for physical education either back in the day or now, he’d been a good runner; light and lithe and with a sharp eye for his surroundings and opponents both. He ran blindly now, though he had some idea of his direction. It wasn’t as if the forest cared for his choice; he fought it at every step, hands cut and bleeding from branches and barbs before he’d made it even halfway. As he saw the break in the foliage, sun cutting through the trunks above, he had resorted to stumbling, breath coming hard and harsh. His throat was on fire. Hux didn’t care.

He could see it, now: the shuttle. Set upon the lakeside shore, amongst the stones. The ramp was closed, but he could scramble in the cockpit’s emergency exit. He was long and lithe and quick, all the things they’d once made fun of him for, all to his strength now. And he laughed, wild and desperate even as he could barely breathe, ribs burning and breaking with every hyperinflation of aching lungs.

But the ship shuddered, began to rise. For a terrible second Hux clenched his hand tight about the blaster, a rare display of poor trigger discipline, as he continued to thrash through the trees, emerging to slide and near-fall in the stone-riddled shore of the lake. There were more of them, his brain carolled in fierce disgust. He had miscalculated, misjudged: and now they would be shot upon at any moment, dead at the hands of smugglers and thieves.

And then a hard grunt, too familiar, had him turning back, eyes stung with sweat, breath a whistle in tightened lungs. He already knew what he would see. It still flooded his veins with burning hot fury.

Ren, face creased, lips downturned, eyes blazing; one arm was thrust out before him, the bare hand opening and closing in fierce concentration. With the damn Force as his slave, Ren raised the ship, far beyond Hux’s limping reach. And with a heave, a shout of pure furious effort, Ren cast it out across the water. It hit hard, bounced once, and then began to sink. With an alarming and swift grace, within moments, she was gone.

“You _bastard_!”

And Ren just shook his head, face drawn and pale, sinking to the rocky shore like a puppet whose strings had been cut for the last time. “You can’t go.”

Hux had no more words. Everything from his lips became incoherent screaming. Within moments he was on him. And Ren allowed it. Despite the sting of his hands, the agony of his wrenched shoulder, Hux clawed at him, hard and hating, ripping the non-descript clothing from his hips, exposing the long length of flushed cock beneath.

His own dick throbbed hard in his pants. And Ren, hands tangled in his hair, finally fought back, drawing his lips down on his. Hux bit back, and hard. The iron taste of warm blood left him dizzy, harder than ever; it tasted of the memory of the giant, of a sweaty hand about his throat, of the glee he’d felt when he’d stumbled back in a fountain of blood, panicked eyes rolling in his idiot head as he’d gone to his knees in pain and terror.

One saber-callused hand curled around his cock, pulling hard. Hux snarled, shoving his hips hard against Ren’s own as his lips worked upward. They paused, knowing and vicious, against the thunderous pulse just beneath the curve of his jaw. The drag of his new beard along the vulnerable skin of his exposed throat drew a stuttering gasp from Ren even as his fingers tugged at his length, thumbing the tip, nails scraping along velvet-hot skin. And Hux wordlessly closed his teeth over pulse, felt Ren shivering beneath him as he came so close to breaking both skin and the flesh beneath.

They came somewhere close to together. In truth Hux scarcely remembered it happening. The rage of bloodlust had moved too quickly into the blind pleasure of sex; it seemed hours later before the capacity for genuine thought woke him as though he’d been dreaming. He found himself half-dressed, shivering in the dark evening air. The lake lapped against the shore, rhythmic, nearly soothing; high above, the wind whispered through the canopy, mocking and sad. He closed his eyes, tried not to hear the breathing of the form at his side, and failed.

“Don’t leave me.”

Without reply, Hux stood. And still in silence he limped back across the beach, sweater half-shredded, his trousers too ruined around the crotch to hold up properly around his hips. Even in the dark he found his way with unerring certainty. He made his way to the cabin, flicked on one of the floodlights before he looked back. The two bodies lay still in the clearing. The stocky man had died instantly; from the clawed hands, and the drag line of dirt and blood behind him, Harsat had gone down a little harder. It made Hux smile. He’d left the first blaster down at the shore, but now he took one of Stocky’s other visible weapons. Its weight felt warm and certain in his hand as he stared down at the ruin of the smuggler.

He had tapped his chest, earlier. On his knees, blaster pressed against one thigh, Hux’s trembling fingers undid the wrapped scarf, tacky and stiff with blood. The jacket and shirt beneath proved simpler, having been shielded from the worst of it. And, against the tattooed skin, he found it: a strange amulet, dark of material, crude and small. He picked it up without the slightest regret or hesitation.

Its short chain felt cool against his skin, its weight heavier than expected as he clasped it closed about his own neck. Neither of things could compare to the sudden and welcome _silence_ that followed. Hux had not realised until now how very _present_ Kylo Ren had become in his own consciousness.

“Hux.”

He turned, pushing back his too-long hair from his collar, displaying the thing like a cheap whore given some bauble by her latest pimp. “Do you think it looks good on me?”

In the dark, standing amongst death, Ren should have been a force of ending and terror. “Take it off.”

Hux bared his teeth. He’d killed them both anyway. “No.” And he turned away, gesturing with the hand that held the blaster in a wide vicious arc. “And get rid of this mess. I don’t want to see it again.”

Without waiting for an answer, Hux disappeared into the house, slamming the door behind him. He had no way of knowing if Ren would do it or not. But he once again collected clothing, soap, towel, and returned to the lake. Naked but for the amulet about his neck, he washed himself free of blood and sweat and the scent of its previous owner. And if he took a moment to tug at his cock, remembering how it had felt pressed up against a hard and familiar body, well, that was nobody’s business but his own, now.

And it was indeed a blessed peace.

 

*****

 

He spent the next several days continuing to pace out his prison, only without the vague accompaniment of Kylo Ren wherever he went. A blaster was now tucked into his belt at all times. He would never again go without its familiar weight at his hip.

On the first day following the attack, Hux considered swimming out to the downed shuttle. But Ren had thrown it a decent distance, and Hux had only a general idea of where it had landed. He was also not a strong swimmer, and had no idea of the depth of the lake. He supposed if it came to that, he could construct a raft and start taking measurements, but Ren would surely notice. Even with the Force suppressor worn about his neck, it wasn’t like Ren didn’t have eyes. And a mostly-functional brain.

He went up to the rocky outcrop once, and found he couldn’t see the aurora anymore. The magnetic storms might had moved on, he supposed. It wasn’t as if he’d understood it in the first place. It still bothered him, faint and strange, even when he turned his back and left the ash and cairn behind. He instead worked on his cannon, watched the skies, and ignored Ren as much as he had before. It just proved far more effective when the man couldn’t crawl inside his head whenever he felt like it.

The bodies had vanished by the time Hux had returned from his bathing that very first night. He still no idea what Ren had done with them. He told himself he didn’t care, though he had eyed the meat in the stews Ren ceaselessly made. They tasted of vacuum seal, that faint bland undercurrent of nutrients lost. But then he wasn’t sure he would have said a word even if it had changed.

He was back at the cabin, again hunting through one of the crates, when he felt Ren’s shadow over him.

“We really have to stop meeting like this,” he drawled, head deep in the crate. “People will talk.”

“I need you to take that amulet off.”

Without pulling his head out, Hux made a very rude gesture, and then went back to work. Ren sighed, short and impatient, and – frustrated? Not that Hux cared. Frustration had been his entire life, back on those last days of the _Finalizer_.

“Hux, I mean it.” When that garnered no response, he added with an almost admirable maturity, “If you don’t want to talk to me, fine. If you want to wander around and avoid me…I just. Whatever. But I need to know you’re all right.”

“Well, if I don’t come home for dinner, Ren, you’ll know I fell into a chasm and broke my neck. Otherwise, it’s just too bad for you.”

“ _Hux_.” This time he did move back, glaring at the other man. Ren stood very still beneath his scrutiny, face calm and grave as he added, soft, “I need you.”

“Why?” Ren frowned, and Hux threw his hands in the air. “No, I mean that. You keep saying that: _I need you, I need you_. But whatever you need me for evades my understanding. Apparently I just need to be on the same forsaken piece of rock as you, if this situation is anything to go by. So fine. It’s not as if I have anywhere else to go, now.” And he snatched for his satchel, flipping it open as he began to stuff gear into it with a fierce carelessness he’d never have permitted otherwise. “But you can’t make me stay anywhere near you. You don’t have that right.”

Ren sank down on a closed crate, eyes. With his great hands dangling between his knees, and head bowed, he seemed a penitent before his master. Despair underlay every drooping curve of his body.

“Can I tell you what happened?”

Hux shivered, even as he shouldered his satchel and lied as easily as he’d ever told the truth. “I don’t think I care enough to know.”

His head shot up, colour high, eyes black. “ _You do_.” And he smiled, involuntary, humourless, as peculiar as the rest of him. “You mourn every single person who was aboard that ship when it blew.” And the smile grew wider, mocking and jealous both. “And you mourn every damn inch of the ship itself, too.”

He should have walked away before Ren had said a word. And yet, those damn words had frozen him to place as well as Ren’s Force hold might have, leaving him trembling and still and furious. “It’s just so _wasteful_.” And like Ren, he smiled, his laugh anything but joyous as he spat out the next sentence. “Do you know how much that ship was worth to the First Order? How many trained personnel would have gone down with her?”

And Ren did not break their gaze. “But it’s not just that. To you.”

“Don’t presume to tell me my priorities or my feelings, Ren.”

His lips thinned, then worked hard before he spoke. “I’m not.” And now, with his hair in disarray and his shoulders hunched forward, he resembled nothing so much as a child come to be chastised. “I did cause the drives to go supercritical. That was me.”

He released a breath, slow and measured. The blaster was but a moment away. “You did this.”

And he looked up, eyes dead, expression flat. “On Snoke’s orders.”

“What?” His trigger finger twitched, relaxed, even as his heart twisted itself up so tight it forgot how to beat. And he was smiling and not knowing how or why or what when he finally managed to say, only, “ _Why_?”

And he shrugged; the despair of his expression reminded Hux of the collapse of his precious base, the way snow had boiled in magma before all had exploded in smoke and ash. “The failure of Starkiller. Or so he said.” Ren whispered then, as if Snoke himself lingered just outside the door, listening to everything that passed between them. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

Very quiet, now, Hux held his tongue. And Ren’s hands rose, fell; their ragged nails had been bitten right down to the quick.

“Like you said, it’s…wasteful. Even if he needed to make an example of someone, you alone would have been sufficient.”

The acid drip of his voice could had burned through durasteel. “Oh, thank you.”

And Ren went on, as if Hux had not said a word. “But he had to destroy the entire thing. Like a child whose favourite doll broke, so he set fire to the entire toy box.”

It hurt. He’d known his failure would lessen him in Snoke’s standing, of course; he’d expected demotion, reassignment to some distasteful duty. But to know Snoke had wished to obliterate not only Hux himself, but all that he’d worked for, all those he’d influenced…pride could convince him it was because Snoke worried they would revolt if their general were taken from them. Objectiveness told him it was far easier to cut out the entire area of diseased flesh surrounding the prime infection, and simply start anew.

“Well, it seems you have more in common with your master than I would have thought,” Hux said, very quiet. And when Ren replied, the venom made him frown, raising his own head.

“He’s not my master.”

Ren often surrendered himself to pure emotion. And yet Hux had never heard such _hate_ before. “Does he know where we are?”

“No.” The certainty there was almost strong enough to make Hux believe him. “It’s one reason why I chose this place.”

“But surely if it’s so strong in the Force, it would _help_ him find you.”

And again he shrugged, though it was not as childish a gesture as it could be. “I was told this place would be…calming. I don’t know. He doesn’t know we’re here.”

“But you don’t know for sure.” His voice was rising, spiralling upward. “You know he wants me dead, and you brought me here, and you don’t _know_.”

Those dark eyes were level and sure. “I trusted him.”

“Who? _Snoke_?”

“No.” And he looked away. “And he was right. I can’t feel Snoke, here. It’s…almost quiet.” And then he looked back, slow and uncertain. “But I miss you.”

Hux’s hand closed over the amulet. “I’m not taking it off.”

“I know.” And Ren sighed, again. “Snoke isn’t even looking for you. The _Finalizer_ is gone. No-one has seen you since. As far as anybody knows, it was an accident. And you went down with your ship.” His eyes were sad, where they locked onto his own. “Isn’t that what any commander would want? To go down with his ship?”

There was nothing more to say, after that. Hux left first, stumbling away. He knew he should be furious, given the original content of their conversation. But the memory of the _Finalizer_ rendered everything else mute: both the ship, and her pyre. She had been his anchor to the universe, and now she was little more than ash and dust. But for all Ren had brought the sword down, he had not been the one to give the order.

Later, he’d ended up in the command shuttle. While he’d long since given up on repairing the comms unit – anything related to transmission had been cleaved or cauterised or both by the damned lightsaber – there yet remained other useful salvage.

He was levering out a particularly useful component when he realised part of the comms unit was still intact. A very curious part. And yet, it still surprised him when he flicked its power button and the small holoscreen projected out from the wall unit. Apparently enough residual power remained in the engines to power the thing, but even that was not the oddest part of the experience.

Scrolling through the selection, past dozens of names that meant nothing to him, he stopped at last on the one that sounded familiar. Hux listened to it once. Then twice. Three times, and counting. It was not as if he had anything better to do.

“That was my favourite song.”

Hux didn’t say a word. The small wall unit continued in its gentle playback, the music soft and yearning, curling through the air like currents upon clear water.

“You like it, too.” Ren stepped further into the shuttle, ducking his head. “Or you did, at least.”

He really ought to pick up the blaster from his side, level it at Ren’s chest, and encourage him to leave before he gained a whole new hole through which to breathe. And yet Hux said not a word as Ren crossed the small space, curling into an even smaller space by his side. And he pressed his head back against the units upon the wall, sharp edges digging into his scalp, and closed his eyes.

“I don’t know what you know about my background, but I can assure you, it was hardly conducive to gaining much knowledge in the way of popular music.”

He counted Ren’s breaths – four – before the man spoke again. “But you know this song.”

And he sighed. “I know this song.”

It played on, lyrics lost somewhere in the slow sweeping harmonies of its mourning bridge. The memories it engendered felt close enough to touch, the past bleeding into the present and rendering the two impossible to tell apart. Hux closed his eyes. But the past was gone – and with it, two very different children. Born worlds apart, forced now onto the same backwater planet just because some fool mystic force had thought it necessary that they learn to suffer together.

“You had your first kiss to this song.”

His lips twitched, bit back a sharp curse. “Get out of my head, Ren.”

“I’m not in it.” And Hux could hear one hand slapping back against the hull, a sharp slap of frustration. “I just…heard it. Like you were saying it.”

Continuing this conversation could only become something he would most likely regret. But he turned his head all the same, still seated on the floor, and stared at the man beside him. “Is that how it always is?”

Ren’s entire body went very still, hands tangled in his lap. Hux could forgive him the startled reaction. Even back on the _Finalizer_ it had been rare enough for Hux to ask questions about the Force; he rarely made any effort to listen even when Ren volunteered information.

He could recognised the stubborn stance as peculiar, now; generally he preferred all the information available, even if he had no plans to do anything with it. But the Force had always been something alien, as naturally unpredictable and chaotic as weather systems. The slightest deviant movement, and the entire system would spiral towards disaster. Hux had no interest in something that could not be modelled, mapped, studied, understood, controlled.

And then Ren shook his head; for all his stillness otherwise, his hands writhed in his lap, fingers picking fiercely at one another, at the frayed fabric of his trousers, “No,” he said, at last. “Usually I have to try…it’s not always a conscious thing. I used to do it as a kid without realising, until…until my mother realised, and taught me not to do it. But sometimes…” He gave a shrug of those broad shoulders. Even in the nondescript clothing, Hux could see he had lost nothing of his previous bulk. “The amulet shields you from me anyway. You were projecting that thought, so I heard it.”

He blinked, looked down. The amulet still felt cool against his skin; it always did, no matter how long he wore it. “Non-sensitives can do that?”

“Everyone is sensitive, at least a little bit.” His eyes had gone distant, dream-like, as he looked up to the faint sliver of the sky beyond the opened hatch. “And this place is very strong in the Force.”

“I’m wearing a suppressor!”

Ren glanced back, though not to Hux himself. Instead his eyes fixed upon the amulet itself, narrowed; he appeared curious and repulsed alike. One hand rose, but the long fingers did not touch the thing. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” And then he met his eyes, more grave than he should have been capable of. “Maybe there are side effects.”

Hux looked away, ignored the faint carol of alarm that set itself off at the back of his mind. “Oh, thank you for that comforting thought, Ren.”

“You should take it off.”

Anger would keep it on despite any stray anxiety, Hux knew. “I don’t think it’s my health that you’re concerned about.”

“It is.”

In the silence that followed, Hux realised the song had long since finished. A large hand reached up, around, flicked it on again. Ren had had to lean over Hux to do it, and now he did not move back to where he had started from. It left them far too close to one another. And yet, neither moved.

Again, Hux’s thoughts drifted to the children who had heard this song first. Both had been disappointments in their own way. Both had been determined to get out from under the shadow of their families, to prove their strength, to be more than what the sly voice of self-doubt told them they could only amount to.

Their foreheads pressed together, and his eyes slipped closed. It was not very much like his first kiss; that had been hurried, full of teeth and spit and pulled hair. They’d been hidden under the blankets in a temporarily deserted dormitory, mid-afternoon between classes, the chance of being caught deliriously high. The little musi-comm lay discarded to one side, the song crooning from the ear buds, distracted by the quick breath and half-choked giggles of a classmate.

This kiss started slow, only grew gentler still. It was something that neither of them had indulged in before. _He killed my crew. He destroyed my ship_. Beneath him, Ren had turned soft, uncertain; he felt nothing like the hard planes of muscle and fury that had struck such fear into hearts and minds across the galaxy. But then, in this moment, Hux himself probably wasn’t the genocidal military brat who had wiped out billions in the name of order over chaos, either.

But it could nothing if not brief. As Ren drew back one hand rose, pressed fingertips against his throat. Hux sighed, knew it to be typical of Kylo Ren; attempting to distract him with sex so he could snatch the thing away. Hux would much have preferred a fist fight, even if the odds were high he’d lose it. But even as he bunched his hands, thumbs carefully folded outside the fists, Ren’s hand moved down, and slid away.

“This amulet.” His eyes had turned dark, impenetrable as a black hole past its event horizon. “It won’t last.”

Hux met those eyes without fear or regret. “Nothing ever does.”

And still Ren stared. The tip of his tongue burned with the need to tell him to go away and never come back. And then Ren’s lips were on his, a light and daring and almost sad thing. And then, like sunset over the equator, he was gone.

 

*****

 

Ren had been right. Hux found that hard to admit, but then the fact that Ren was the only Force user on a planet apparently soaked in its power made it somewhat easier to accept. That didn’t make the actual result feel any better, the night that it happened: the creeping return of the sensation of being _watched_. Of being constantly _known_. But he had never been the type for self-delusion, at least not of the most obvious kind. The amulet had become useless, and therefore he took it off and let it fall and decided never to think of it again. He had a mechanical mind, not a mystical one.

Some part of him yearned to turn back, to keep the damned thing in the hopes it might somehow recharge. Hux kept walking. Soon the more pressing and distressing urge become the one that demanded he change course, that he return to the burned-out cairn of the _Finalizer_. But for better or worse, the rocky outcrop was too far.

The lake presented the only real alternative. Down on its shore, Hux removed his shoes, stuffing the socks deep into their soft toes. With his feet in the cool water, he closed his eyes. Night had come down near-completely, but he’d become accustomed to walking the path between lakeshore and cabin long before now. He permitted himself a low sigh.

And then someone coughed behind him. It was not Ren’s voice. Already on his feet, toes curled about stone and knees locked, Hux had pulled the blaster from his waistband and aimed it before he’d even seen his target.

He did not fire. He already knew there was no point. But he did not lower the blaster as he demanded, “Who the karking hell are _you_?”

The man’s expression was one of lively curiosity, muted though it was by frank suspicion. “You can see me?”

“Well, I presume so. Although I did warn Ren about those mushrooms he put in the stew last night.” Lowering the blaster now, Hux raised one hand, rubbed his eyes; the light haloing the other man was not bright, but it hurt his eyes all the same. “I was hoping that talking to the rather unconvincing hallucination might make it go away, in fact.”

He did not move, but rather tilted his head. Even in this form, half-transparent and seemingly constructed of light, the searching power of his gaze almost hurt. And despite the apparent age of him, with his greyed-out hair and beard, and the wrinkles that folded his face with age and experience, his eyes remained very blue, and very sharp. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works,” he said, at last, and Hux finally let the blaster fall away.

“How inconvenient for us both.”

“Indeed.” And he turned, then, looked off into a middle distance populated by a grand total of nothing. “Anakin. Did you know about this?”

What little skin he had exposed to the night air prickled with gooseflesh, the same uneasy strange feeling as when he’d watched Ren shouting at thin air. “It’s rude, you know,” he said, sudden and without thought. “To talk to people I can’t see.”

The old man turned back, an eyebrow arched high. “Oh, you can’t see Anakin?” And now he frowned, stepping closer; under that sharp gaze, Hux took an involuntary step backward. The spirit took no notice, advanced until they stood but a foot apart. “This is very peculiar,” he murmured, hands disappearing into the bells of his sleeves. And then he stepped back, tilted his head to the other side, and snorted. “Although perhaps not as peculiar as your being able to see _me_ at all.”

“Believe me, I am no more pleased at the development than you are.” The next words were flatly spoken, not a question in any sense of the word. “You’re Obi-Wan Kenobi, aren’t you.”

“Indeed.” And there was a dry kind of surprise about the words when he said, “Am I _that_ famous amongst the First Order’s high command, then?”

“Well, we are all well-versed in our Darth Vader lore, shall we say?”

A startled chuckle escaped, but was soon suppressed. It still allowed Hux the vague sense of a younger self – of someone who carried less, a memory shimmering beneath the ancient surface, like silver fish deep in the rushing currents of time.

“Still, this is strange indeed.” And he moved with surprising grace for an old man, dead or no, as he skirted around Hux and towards one of the flat boulders closer to the tree line. “Perhaps it is a result of that little trinket you’ve been using to torment young Ben.”

Hux turned with him, and snorted. “Oh, you don’t think he _deserved_ that?”

Given he was seating himself at the time, Hux couldn’t see Kenobi’s face; he still suspected he had actually heard the faint snort of amusement. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he said, settling himself. His expression had turned very cold when he added, “Although you’re equally cruel to one another.”

Hux smiled. “I was taught well.” And, despite the fact the old dead man had seemed to settle himself in for the long haul, he indicated the pathway back to the cabin. “Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“No. No, I don’t think I will.” He said it in the tones of a genial old man; his eyes were the cold command of a man who had seen war, and left it bloodied and dying in his wake. “Come, talk with me a while.”

Hux did not move. “I hardly think we have much to discuss.”

“Something seems to believe we do.”

He told himself that he wanted nothing more than to walk away. This _was_ his first chance at a conversation in weeks, and the smugglers he’d killed didn’t count. But that creeping sensation, the same he’d had whenever Ren had tried to discuss the Force with him, had begun to curl clawed cold fingers about his heart and throat. His rational mind demanded he leave it all behind – the way he’d done with his childhood toys, with bedtime stories, with the need for gentle touch and warm lips against his temple as he curled beneath his blankets in his small bed.

And Kenobi stared at him all the while, watching, waiting. “Do you want to know what Ben is doing here?”

He closed his eyes, regretted every word. “By _Ben_ , you mean Kylo Ren, yes?”

“You are aware his birth name was Ben Organa Solo?”

“Yes.”

“And he killed his father.”

They have really never spoken of it, save for the one time Hux had thrown it in Ren’s face. He didn’t know why this should provoke regret in him now. “I realise that.” Hux took a step forward, bare feet sure on the stones as he drew closer to the old man. As he took his place, he looked out across the lake, set his jaw. When he’d made his decision, commitment to it was the easy part. “Is that why he’s here? To sulk over what he chose to do?” he asked, voice low and steady. “I mourned what he did to me. And I’m done with it. So why should I indulge him any further?”

“Where else have you to go?”

His jaw ached, now; he could hear the way his teeth ground before he unlocked the clench of his jaw, forced words out between whitened lips. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you.”

“And yet here you remain,” Kenobi observed. The only real comfort Hux could take from this was the clear sensation that the old man enjoyed this conversation no more than he did. And with an ugly twist of lips and brow, he threw his hands up, let them fall back upon his thighs with thunderous slap.

“Have I any choice?”

Kenobi appeared unimpressed by the flash of temper. But then, if he spent his time around the spirit of Anakin Skywalker – had spent his actual _life_ around Anakin Skywalker – he had surely seen many a more impressive display. “There are always choices,” he said instead, even, simple. “They are not always presented to us that way. Sometimes, we must go and find them ourselves.”

Hux allowed his head to rest, aching, in the cradle of his hands. “At no stage did I ever choose to be subjected to so-called Jedi wisdom.”

A short laugh is all he got before Kenobi’s voice hardened again. “Shall I tell you why you are here?”

The memory of the command shuttle came to him from nowhere. That damned song followed quick behind, and with it the remembered ghost of Ren’s lips on his own, tender and trembling. And before that: the scent of blood and death, the rocks of the shore digging into his side as their hands tangled around their aching cocks. The hot release between, salty and sticky. And a whisper, half broken on a desperate moan.

_Don’t leave me._

The flush built high on his cheeks. He still met the old man’s eyes with even dignity. “Fine. I’ll bite. Why am I here?”

Old Kenobi blinked, just once. “So far as I can ascertain – because I cannot speak to Ben myself – he believes that you are the key to his balance between the Light and the Dark.”

And he spoke in such an easy didactic tone; that of a person who had been a teacher for many a year. It made Hux instinctively crave to believe every word he said. But then, he was like no teacher Hux had known. He could already see Kenobi was not a man for lecturing, for conducting a lesson of rote memorisation. He would instead lay out fact and conjecture so Hux might teach himself what he most needed to learn.

And he laughed, short and sharp. “Much as I would wish not to admit it, you’ve already lost me.”

An ironic smile crossed those weathered features, wry and wise and very, very weary. “I don’t need you to understand the Force, Brendol.”

The name rippled along his skin, under and over it, the sharp shock of a touching a naked electrical wire. “It would be preferable if you didn’t call me that.”

“Well, I’m hardly going to address you as General.” Again, Hux felt it: that sense of someone younger, freer with his thoughts and tongue alike. But it was but fleeting, the older self pressing back, those too-blue eyes fixed upon him. “Ben came here because Anakin told him to.”

He shivered, though some part of him had known as much some time ago. “Anakin Skywalker being Darth Vader.”

Kenobi shook his head, leaned back upon the boulder. “They are not the same.”

And Hux arched an eyebrow. “No more than Kylo Ren is Ben Solo, I’d wager.”

“Correct.” That sense of his past as a master returned to Hux; Kenobi spoke of Jedi tenets as if they were the only absolute truth of all the galaxies entire. “It is the same soul, but two facets.”

“And this is the Skywalker side, that Ren is talking to.”

“Yes.”

For a long moment, Hux let that stand. He found it didn’t make any more sense, the more he considered it. “He was always more interested in Darth Vader, I thought.”

“Which is one reason why Anakin could never reach him, before now.” And his hands, gnarled and spotted with age, lay still in his robed lap. Hux didn’t even know if Force ghosts could carry lightsabers. “Darth Vader is dead. Anakin Skywalker continues on, for those of his blood.”

Sudden anger flared, his voice echoing out across the faintly rippled surface of the great lake. “So why can’t _he_ fix him? Why am _I_ here?”

Kenobi remained silent long enough for something very close to shame to flush along Hux’s cheeks. And then he shook his head. “At this stage, I don’t know. Anakin is trying to work through this, but…”

“But?”

The sour look this earned him might have been funny, under less dire circumstances. “The way is not clear.”

“Fantastic.” Pushing to his feet, Hux ran both hands back through his hair, didn’t care if it stood out in all directions. “I still don’t see why he needs me.”

Kenobi remained seated as Hux began to pace, voice modulated and low. “While the Jedi eschewed love of a romantic type, it has proven in the past to…have great transformative power, within the Force. Both in the Dark, and the Light.” The tone of his voice had a forced quality, as if he read from some script Hux could not see, one he had no care to memorise himself. “Padmé Amidala was like this, to Anakin. He believes that you might do something similar for Ben.”

“If I am remembering correctly, Padmé Amidala _died_.”

“She did.”

“So for Ren to focus his abilities, I must also die?” With a laugh, he quickened his pace, kicked a stone hard; it skittered away in a pitiful skip, his bare toes aching at the insult. “Forgive my ignorance of the Force and its wonderful ways, but I’m rather failing to see what benefit this has for me, myself.”

A half-grin flickered across his face before he could stop it, accompanied by a sideways look that lasted but a second. Again, Hux had to wonder how Kenobi had looked as a younger man. The only archival holos he’d seen of the man had been security footage from the first Death Star, inserted into old Imperial propaganda. And Kenobi shook that ancient head now, and sighed. “It does not have to be that way.”

“So you say.” Now he pulled to a halt, telling himself it was because he needed to be still for the conversation, not because his feet had begun to ache abominably. He had always hated being planetside. “So what’s stopping this…insight, of yours? Why can’t Skywalker work out what’s going on? Because I assume he told Ren to come here because this rock amplifies the Force. I can understand that. But why can’t he _see_?”

“Snoke.”

Even the name alone could sent a frisson of fear along his spine, like the cut of a diamond blade: so sharp, one did not even know they bled until it was too late. “You know about Snoke?”

And Kenobi’s brow furrowed. “I did not know him when I was alive, if that is what you mean – either as a reality, or as a rumour.” And then he cast a hand out, around, expression wry, “But as you can see, death is…eventful, amongst the Jedi.”

“I have never been gladder to be blind to the Force,” he said, and meant it.

“Unfortunately, it seems you can see more than you might wish.” And despite the flick of one hand over his robed, shimmering form, Hux did not think the old man referred solely to himself. “But Snoke clearly desired something he could not have in either a Sith or a Jedi.”

“He wanted someone who was both.” He pursed his lips, decided the sentence was incomplete, added, “And neither.”

“Precisely.” Folding his arms, Kenobi looked upwards, eyes taking a faraway sheen. Hux could almost imagine the stars reflected in them, had they not shone clear through his hazy form. “The Jedi shunned extravagances of deep feeling, dedicating themselves to a life of service. The Sith relied on the wellspring of deep emotion – whether love, lust, hate, fear, anger – to give their connection to the Force chaotic strength.”

Hux had many a memory of Ren, still and calm – and then a moment later, his lightsaber leaving a trail of absolute destruction. “But Ren isn’t a balance between the two. From what I’ve seen, Snoke doesn’t even _try_ to make him that way. Why would that be?”

“That is not known to me.” The faint smile upon his lips did not linger. “I am a relic of older days, Brendol. These are the new ages.” And his gaze had turned away again, caught in the amber of distant memory, when he added softly, “Ben Solo is something different entirely.”

“I want no part of this.” At the sharp look this earned him, he spoke again before Kenobi could complain. Even when the dead man wasn’t his actual teacher, wasn’t even of his own beliefs, Hux could still never stand to be corrected. “And before you say it, I realise the irony. The Jedi were order and tradition. The Sith were freedom and fury. The First Order, on that level, has far more in common with your fool philosophies than anything the Dark Side might have to offer.”

He laughed, startled more than amused. Something very peculiar flickered in his eyes as he shook his white head. Hux recognised the look; he’d seen it more than once on the face of his teachers, when a student had answered a question so very incorrectly they hadn’t even known where to begin in their correction.

“In fact you would have made a poor Jedi, Brendol Hux,” Kenobi said at last, but instead of the expected distaste or disappointment, Hux noted only a strange kind of inquisitiveness in him. “But I should liked to have taught you, all the same. Your mind is a curious cipher of a thing.”

One eyebrow arched. “Is that a compliment?”

“I’ll let you decide that for yourself.”

Something in Hux genuinely wanted to laugh. But though his life had recently become the punchline of a very terribly cruel joke, he kept it to himself. “I’d really rather not,” he said instead, and turned towards the path. Still he could not help but look back to the man, as if he were more lodestone than spirit. “Look, educational as this has been, I’d rather end this conversation here.”

“Understandable.”

And yet Hux could not stop staring at him. It reminded him of the way he’d loved to watch the charging cycles of Starkiller, even when it left it half-blinded and with a migraine for the rest of the afternoon. “I have a question.”

Kenobi only opened his hands, then closed them again. The watchful eyes changed not at all; Hux had the prickling sensation they missed very little, and was somehow rather glad that he’d met the dead man and not the live one. It required forceful effort to focus instead on the query that fierce curiosity had driven from him, despite his far better judgement.

“Ren always bleated on that he was doing his grandfather’s work.” Kenobi blinked, very quick, and Hux pushed on. “Is that true? Is that what was asked of him?”

A fleeting sadness crossed his features, turned weary. “No.”

It should have made him happy. It should have been something like victory. Instead, as he turned back to the path through to the cabin, he felt only something he supposed was sorrow.

 

*****

 

The cannon had improved by leaps and bounds. Hux wasn’t terribly surprised; he had nothing but time, and to a perfectionist, time meant many effective hours spent upon his pet project. Her aim had become more precise, her movements fluid, the ammunition live in fresh ways and far more fit for purpose.

He felt like a child taking down small rodents when he shot the ship out of the sky; it had been almost too easy by far. And he did not regret its loss. He’d already determined, even at distance, that it was inadequate for his own escape needs. But hopefully its destruction would call down something slightly more suited to the plans he continued to make.

He was also perfectly aware Ren would come looking for him. While he could go deeper into the forest, without the amulet he would just be a moving target with no cover to take. Hux saw no point in hiding. He waited, instead, on the high ground he’d already crowned with a weapon of his own smug construction.

And it pleased him to see Ren, winded and wild, drag himself up the hill to stand before him in magnificent wrath. The budgetary consequences of his childish temper quite aside, Hux had always found him rather marvellous when in full fury.

“Are you _insane_?”

Hux took another puff on the cigarette, shrugged his bared shoulders. He’d removed the shirt, leaving himself only in a singlet; much as he despised sunlight, it felt comfortingly warm today. “High praise, coming from you,” he noted, and then hid his smile behind another drag as Ren looked fit to tear his own hair out.

“You can’t call attention to us!” His maddened gaze fixed upon the cannon, and Hux promised himself he’d kneecap the bastard before he let him put his saber anywhere near her. “I have _work_ to do here!”

“Well, I don’t.” Taking another long drag, he crushed the cigarette out on the makeshift ashtray, let it fall from his fingers. “I want to go home.”

Ren’s face twisted – but for all the way he wished to dig the knife into Hux’s chest, Hux could see how its double-edged blade turned itself back on its owner. “You don’t _have_ one.”

“Then I want to make one.” And he climbed down from the cannon, shook out his too-long hair. He hated it this way. But it was necessary, especially as he observed, “You owe me that much, at least.”

“Hux.” The warring expression on his face was constructed mostly of fury losing badly to terror. “They’ll hang you. You must know that. You’re Brendol Hux. General Starkiller.”

“So I won’t _be_ Hux.” And he rolled his tongue around his teeth, took a sharp breath through his nose, let out a sharp sigh that tasted of smoke and oil. “You’ve changed your name enough. You should know how it works.”

It was a low blow and they both knew it. When Ren spoke, it was but a whisper. “Names don’t matter to him.” And he swallowed, dry and hard. “He’ll find you.”

“What do you care?”

Hux had hit Ren before, and more than once. But he had never left him as winded and wounded as this. “I care.”

And he had to look away, rubbing his eyes. It was just the sun. They hurt because he’d been out in the sun too long, and his allergy medication was wearing off again. “I never asked you to do that.”

Those huge damn eyes bored into the curved line of his back. “Hux.”

He did not turn back. But still he asked. “What?”

“I came here to find myself. To centre myself. To marshal my strength and understand the path I am to walk.” And he took a trembling breath, angry and frustrated and – and yes, _scared_. “Everything I needed to achieve this? It all circled back around to you.”

And now he turned back, skin pale and clammy, eyes bright, hands in fists. “I’m not a thing, Ren. I’m not some mystical blessed item you can pick up and drag along on a quest. I’m a _person_. I have wants and needs of my own. None of those are being met here.”

Ren swallowed, convulsive and quick. “Because you keep walking away from me.”

“Because I don’t want to be near you.”

Ren turned away before he spoke, voice low and as monosyllabic as it had been beneath the vocoder. “I’ll think about it.”

He could get nothing else from Ren but that. With a frustrated sigh, not really knowing that he trusted Ren with his precious cannon, Hux started walking. He didn’t get far before night came again, familiar and almost comforting.

He didn’t go out by the lake. Instead he meandered along the spring-moss beds of the river, watching the water instead of his steps. Silver fish darted beneath its tumbling surface, its rushing sound still not enough to drown out his own thoughts. Or the sound of shouting, the slash and burn of a lightsaber. Old habits died hard, it seemed. He supposed he could have been flattered that it was his rejection of Ren’s little kidnapping stunt that set the idiot off again. And he’d been doing so very well.

By his chrono, it had been several hours of silence when the voice came out of the dark at his back.

“Brendol.”

With a sigh he turned, even as he wished for nothing more to keep walking. The shimmering light of him still hurt, white and blue and far too bright indeed. Hux looked back to the water, and frowned at the ruin of his reflection. But even if not for the change in the quality of the light wrought by the creature’s presence alone, he’d have known that Kenobi remained. Even in such ephemeral form, the strength of him sang in solid harmony, death but a melody to the fragile chaos of life itself.

And he raised his hands, let them fall; the words came out more frustrated than the fury he’d have preferred. “I just don’t understand why you’d bother talking to me like this.”

And Kenobi drifted around to his side, strangely solid for all Hux suspected he could put a hand right through him. Not that he could bring himself to even attempt it. “Well, I do understand that talking to you isn’t going to bring back the billions of people whose deaths you ordered.” The hard edge to his words, genial as they were spoken, actually comforted Hux; he did not need the friendship of a dead Jedi. And he could appreciate practicality, and did so when the old man added, “But _not_ talking to you won’t bring them back, either.”

Keeping his eyes fixed upon the tumble of the water, never-changing in its chaotic form, Hux pursed his lips, contemplated a litany of choices. He ended with only one. “I’m leaving.”

From the corner of one eye, he could see Kenobi’s faint nod. “So Ben has told Anakin.”

And he turned at that, voice sharpening to a fine point. “He _said_ that?”

“Yes.” And any joy or relief Hux might have felt soon blunted with Kenobi’s flat addition of, “But there’s a problem.”

“It’s not my problem.”

“It is.” Kenobi’s voice had turned hard now. “Ben was right when he said Snoke would find you.” Hux glanced up, met those cold eyes directly as he said, now almost gentle, “Snoke has already found you.”

It felt as though a bundle of ice from dead Starkiller had been forced through his open mouth and down a spasming throat. Hux choked around the single word he could manage, hands balled to fists, spine straight and shaking. “What?”

A sadness had entered in those dead man’s eyes. Somehow it only added to the terror of the moment. “I don’t know that he realises it yet,” he said, and with a gentleness few would reserve for a man long since guilty of genocide. And then he shook his head, the inevitability of fate. “But he will.”

Hux dropped; fortunately a decently sized boulder lurked behind him, one he could perch his trembling form upon without falling completely on his ass. His hands shook where he raised them, pushing back his too long hair, dragging over the beard. A thousand questions ordered themselves in his head, and yet he could croak out only the simplest of them all. “ _How_?”

Kenobi remained, arms crossed, expression distant and dreaming – but from the troubled tilt of his ancient features, he knew that he lurked upon the opened edges of a nightmare. “I know what Snoke is now.”

Hux closed his eyes. “Who?”

“ _What_.” The correction had Hux opening his eyes. And Kenobi’s voice turned on a sigh, his sorrow tainted with clear wonder. “He’s a creation of Ben Solo.”

And Hux sat very still, even as the world tilted around him in kaleidoscope ruin. “What?”

Kenobi nodded, just once. “And then he created Kylo Ren. They’re all facets of the very same person.”

He had gone very cold. “No.” Perhaps he would never be warm again. “No, that’s impossible.”

“It’s not.” And now Kenobi was leaning down over him, one hand upon his chin, forcing him to look into his dead eyes. And Hux could do nothing, say nothing, as Kenobi told him without apology, “And you are the only person alive who can make Kylo Ren do something to fix it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is all slightly horrific and deserves apologies all around. Partially that's because it's so _late_ , but also that it's so _long_. I kind of debated trying to score it somewhere down the middle, and then decided I'd spent three days on Easter working on this, and then that that was the internationally recognised sign for LET IT GO.
> 
> So. Thank you for reading this far, and even though this conclusion is one convoluted confusing mess, I hope at least a little of it makes it worth it. I started the story wanted to write something about Ren and Hux on a journey of self-discovery. It turned into Hux going on a rant about how much he hates the fucking Force. Oh lord. I'm so, so sorry.

He hadn’t stopped shaking for the first ten minutes. It left his body as a topography of aching tremors that, despite having calmed somewhat, still lurked just below the surface in uneasy tectonic shift. Kenobi had at least allowed Hux his silence while it happened. He’d made no motion to touch him – not that it would have been possible – but he’d also made no verbal attempts at comfort. Hux might have thanked him for that. If he’d had words enough for it. If he wasn’t holding himself together by sheer will alone.

And then he swallowed hard, croaked around the one thought he’d finally managed to get a grip on.

“So,” he said, and coughed, hard; his hands had tangled so tightly about one another in his lap they’d turned white and numb. “ _So_ , you’re telling me Ben Solo created an entire alternate personality out of _thin air_ because his grandfather was himself an immaculate conception and both are wildly strong in the Force?” And without intending to, he laughed, a short and sudden bark. “You know, it’s nonsense like this that’s _why_ people hated the Jedi. I hope you realise that.”

Kenobi shook his head, though at what, Hux could not quite tell; from his expression, he himself had had quite enough of being the galaxy’s idea of a good laugh. “We’re not entirely sure _how_ Ben did this. It only became apparent when Ben threw himself into despair over the thought of losing you.”

For the first time since the initial revelation, Hux went very still. “He did what?”

One hand moved over his face, tired and taut. “He came to ask Anakin for advice immediately after your conversation – although if it makes any difference to you, which I suspect it might not, he had already made the decision to let you go.” Something cold glimmered now, in those blue eyes; it reminded Hux of the tall seracs of the glacial fields of Starkiller, those glittering towers that could fall at any moment and crush those who walked unknowing in their blue shadows. And Kenobi gave a harsh chuckle, as if the thought was his to read. “He could barely _speak_.”

When Hux had taken Ren from the ruins of Starkiller, he had been all loose limbs and disjointed speech; some of it he had recognised, most of it had been just a jumble of sound and slurred syllables. He hadn’t discovered until later that Ren had killed his father. That had come after, when he had stared at the body floating in a bacta tank while hyperspeed took them only physically distant from the evidence of their grand failure.

Shoving to his feet, Hux began to pace; it was a good few moments before he could force himself in a military rhythm, short and sharp and soothing. “I didn’t _ask_ to be brought here,” he said, voice rising, already giving himself over to the grateful familiarity of debate and defence. “He could have just left me on the _Finalizer_! He said it himself: a commander should go down with their ship.” He stopped short, hands clasped tight behind his back, fingers still numb as he faced the motionless Kenobi before him. “I grew up in the Unknown Realms, you know. I spent my childhood planetside, in the temporary academies they built wherever they could claw out enough resources. But when I was old enough, I transferred to a placement on a starship. I’ve been on them ever since. Starkiller was the most time I’ve spent planetside since I was ten years old.” He meant to end the speech on a hard note, a simple truth. Instead, his voice broke like glass. “The _Finalizer_ was my home.”

And Kenobi leaned back, eyes dropping; discomfort radiated from him as strongly did the light that appeared to sustain his ghostly form. “I’m not arguing that point with you.”

“But it’s relevant,” he insisted; he felt again a child, standing up before a room of classmates and one stony instructor, all waiting for him to misstep and fail, for his voice to break and fade away to shamed silence. “I don’t think you understand: Ben took my home from me. My entire _life_.”

And Kenobi only sighed. “In his defence, he was in a unique position to know that you had no more life left to live, in those places.”

Now anger returned. Drawing a deep breath, he drank deep of its heat, of its bitter strength. “And that gives him the right to take from me my death?” he demanded, incredulous and furious alike. “The one that _he_ ordered?”

“Ah, and that’s where things become tricky.” Kenobi raised one hand, gave a small wave; a teacher’s gesture to silence a student during a lesson. Hux gritted his teeth, resisted the urge to bite a finger off. From the faint, very distant amusement in Kenobi’s eyes, he’d caught something of that, though his words were little but grave. “Snoke and Ben are not the same person, no more than are Kylo Ren and Ben Solo. That is what I meant when I said Snoke has the means to know your location, but we cannot be sure whether or not he actually does.”

“So how did _you_ find this out?” His restless feet took him to pacing again, though his hands were before him now, palms rubbing painfully together, long fingers loose and useless. “That Ben Solo created Snoke?” he added, and winced; the thought lanced through his mind with all the destruction pitilessness of a migraine. “I can’t…how is it even _possible_?”

From the pained expression Kenobi yet wore, he found the concept no easier to disseminate. “You said yourself that Anakin Skywalker is an anomaly. No-one, including Anakin himself, really knows where he came from. But the Force gave him to Shmi, and here we are.” Here he paused, overlong; when Hux glanced to him, Kenobi’s gaze had risen to the sky, eyes as dark and distant as the lives of those already long dead. “Shmi was a woman of strong will. And she adored Anakin.”

Hux paused, again, shifted uncomfortably. His borrowed shoes still didn’t fit quite right. But he had learned to make do. “This…Shmi. She was Skywalker’s mother?”

“Yes.” The dark blue of his dead eyes allowed no disbelief when he said, very quiet, “Anakin had no father.”

Hux closed his eyes. He had known of the existence of the Force from early childhood; no child of former Imperialists could escape the stories of how one lone Jedi had begun the chain of self-destruction that had brought the Empire to ruin. Even then, he’d never quite believed it. No administration was but one day from total collapse. And no charlatan magic could have such singular power. In the end, there was really no such thing as magic, at all.

When he spoke again, his voice was a ragged, terrible thing. “Where is Ren now?”

“Sleeping.” The grey head had bowed forward, as if filled by some terrible weight. “Ben’s mind is a complex place.”

Far above, something moved from one treetop to the next. Despite realising the dark would obscure his view, Hux glanced up, saw only the faint movement of leaf and branch, watched them return to their previous stillness. “I realise that,” he said, inflectionless and cold.

“Have you been in his mind?”

“No.” He wanted to laugh at the mere idea of it. But the more he considered it, the less amusing he found it to be. By now he traced his eyes over foreign constellations, ordering their positions, assigning them names. “But then, he’ll make himself at home in mine whenever it suits him. He says it’s because it’s…tidier. Quieter. I never thought much of it.”

He made the tactical error of ending that last sentence by looking back to Kenobi. All it earned him was a tangled hot feeling of guilt, low in his abdomen; Kenobi looked to be a man stood before the lighted pyre of his only remaining friend. “The thought of losing you allowed Anakin access to places he’d hadn’t seen before,” he said, and Hux knew it was only the beginning, that it was only the start. And again he took to his feet, stumbling in the dark now as he threw his hands out and thrust his voice to the sky.

“ _Why_?” He whirled on him, hands now bunched to fists. “Why do _I_ have to be part of all this?” His breath caught in his throat, lungs tight and trembling, an ache in a breathless chest. “Are you sure this isn’t a delayed reaction to having killed Han Solo? Because frankly I cannot see at all the logic behind pinning this all on _me_.”

Kenobi rose, stepped close; even knowing that the creature couldn’t touch him, Hux still ducked sharply away. In return Kenobi only sighed, hands folded into the voluminous sleeves of his robe. “I’m not saying it’s your _fault_ , Brendol,” he said, and if there was any pity there, it had mostly been buried beneath iron acceptance. “But you are involved in this. And sometimes we are not given choices in these things.”

He spoke with the voice of someone who knew – and not by rote nor story, but bitter experience. Hux wished for little more than to throw his head back and scream until his vocal chords ruptured.

But he had been raised better than that. “I just don’t _understand_ ,” he groaned, instead; Kenobi only nodded, weary and knowing.

“Anakin could never get through to him before, could never see what happened in his childhood to make him so open to Snoke’s influence. Or even where Snoke’s influence came from. It was all locked away, with a child’s stubborn power. Ben himself had no memory of it; from that alone, Anakin had no hope of accessing those memories.”

For a moment Hux allowed the words to settle upon the surface of his mind; as they began to sink, changing shape with the pressure of deeper knowledge, he frowned. “But he can now,” he said, already drowning, already desperate to come up for air even as the thought weighted him down in the depths. “Why? After this many years, why now?”

“Because he was afraid of losing something he could never get back.”

The laughter was short, sharp, and hurt himself more than anyone else. “He killed his _father_. Surely that was more catastrophic a loss.”

“And it contributed.” The sorrow Hux caught then was a short, sudden thing; he supposed Kenobi had known Han Solo. And then Kenobi gathered himself, returned to the didactic mode he wore as well as he did his ghostly skin. “But Ben had convinced himself that he’d lost both his parents – and his uncle, for that matter – a very long time ago. From the moment he realised how much his powers _scared_ them, they were but a moment away from loss. And so, he made himself always ready for it.” The small strangled noise Hux made had Kenobi sighing, yet again; his eyes were very calm when he added, “You…you’re something different.”

“He never expected to lose me.” He spoke with dull assurance. “Because he didn’t realise there was something for him to lose in the first place.”

“And is there?”

His hands slammed down on his thighs, bruising and harsh. “I don’t _know_!” Again, he began to pace, hands tight in the too-long hair. “He’s just…somebody I was forced to work with. And he drove me mad, right from the beginning. Fucking him seemed to calm him down, and I’m sure you’re aware that otherwise fraternisation is a genuine pain in the ass for someone of my station. As far as I could see it, we were just equals blowing off steam together. I didn’t realise he _loved_ —”

The sudden silence fell between them like the pause of a primed weapon, poised upon the point of final ignition. And then anger ripped through him like exploding plasma.

“How could you people not _know_? I mean, you’re _dead_. What else do you have to do all day?”

Kenobi, in the aftermath, sat very quiet and very still. “Why didn’t you notice?”

It was given as a genuine question. Hux still took it as an accusation. “It wasn’t my job!” he almost shrieked, and Kenobi allowed his head to fall forward.

“No, it wasn’t. I’m sorry I said that.” And then he looked up, aged by not only the years of his life, but also of his death. “Anakin is still trying to make sense of what he saw in Ben’s head, earlier. But the simplest conclusion, I suppose, is that Ben was a very lonely, and very powerful, young boy. He knew even then that he would never be as intelligent and beautiful as his political mother, as charming and clever as his smuggler father. They were war heroes. He was a clumsy and awkward little thing, conceived by accident, legitimised by a hurried marriage. And he did not have to be the prodigy he was to see marriage suited his parents ill. They did better when apart, only meeting now and then. His presence forced them to stay together more than was natural for them.”

Hux looked away, as worn and empty as an overfired cannon. “I don’t need to know this.”

“Brendol. I’m sorry, but you do.” And even as Hux drew a shuddering breath, Kenobi went relentlessly on. “Because while little Ben already knew he wouldn’t be like his uncle, the hero Jedi and ace pilot who saw himself the fall of Palpatine, he knew the Force was strong in him. He could feel it. And it frightened him.” The regret in him was a palpable thing. “And so he called on the only person he felt any true kinship with. The one whose name they whispered with fear – the same fear they had begun to feel about him.”

He’d always hated the feel of the words upon his tongue; that repulsion only grew bitterer still. “Darth Vader.”

“Yes. But as I’ve said, Darth Vader was long dead. And Ben, unintentionally, blocked Anakin out.”

“And so he never heard back.” It might have been funny, if not for what had followed. Hux himself had stood upon the edge of madness and watched billions of lives extinguished in one brutal strike. And all because of one little boy, and his lonely days amongst people who loved him still. And he closed his eyes, and he did not laugh.

“He talked to ghosts,” he said, very quiet, “and none talked back. So he made one up.” But already he was frowning, his mind rebelling at the tangle of such idiot logic. “But how does an imaginary friend of a small child become the most powerful subversive force in the galaxy?”

“The Force is neither Light nor Dark. That is why we talk about balance.” Hux made a faint sound of complaint, yet Kenobi went on. “Ben has much power in the Force. Even as a child it dwarfed that of most sensitives. And he wanted Snoke to exist so badly he _made_ him exist. Snoke gave him reasons, gave him encouragement, gave him _hope_.” Here his voice took on a faint bitterness; and Hux could remember holovids watched as a child, a figure in tan and beige, standing at the hand of the Senator who would become Emperor. “That is what drove Snoke: the hope of a child. It gave him purpose, it made him real. And so he emerged from the shadows and offered wisdom to those in the burgeoning First Order who feared the return of the Jedi Order. How could they say no to his unique aid, when these old Imperialists had just watched one Jedi bring down the entire Empire?”

His head hurt. He didn’t think it would ever not hurt again. “So they _are_ separate people.”

“In as much as they can be, yes,” Kenobi said, “Snoke is a separate entity. But taking that much of himself and thrusting it away, it…it left Ben broken. Hence the creation of Kylo Ren. I suppose he thought he’d feel less scattered if he became someone else entirely.”

Hux’s laughter was faint, scarcely audible. “It didn’t work.”

“No.”

It hurt to consider everything, now. Snoke had always spoke in projections; Hux himself had never spoken to another officer or high official who had actually met Snoke in person. And then there was the strange patchwork of flesh that made up his misshapen face, and the dark eyes that squinted out with the dire disgust of button eyes sewn on some ugly ragdoll. The nausea roiling in his stomach made him bend forward, bile hot and bitter in his mouth.

“Brendol?”

“I need to be alone.”

The dead man took a slow breath. “We need you.”

“Yes, I realise that, I just…” But he was standing, stumbling. “Just let me…”

He managed nothing more. The further away he moved from the river, the more he longed never to stop. It would be almost too easy to return to the charred remains of the _Finalizer_ ’s cairn, to build up the logs and kindling once more and lay down in her burning heart. Ren must have destroyed the reactor somehow. It likely wouldn’t have exploded right away; it would have vented poisonous gases for some time before overwhelming the containment systems. Many of the crew had probably choked to death on burning air before the reactor had eventually detonated.

Hux closed his eyes, forced to a stop, choking himself on clean crisp air. He had not managed to go far at all. Instead he turned, found himself walking back to the cabin. The fire burned low before the opened door. He stumbled past, inside, and not to his own room.

In the dark, on his knees, Hux took a trembling place at his bedside. Ren appeared drugged, long limbs haphazard on the small cot, blankets scattered across the floor. Nothing of his sleep seemed peaceful; the dark head lolled, skin translucent-pale and sweat-damp, hands limp and twitching.

A faint prickling the hairs upon the nape of his neck was his only indication of the other presence. Hux could not see him – did not _want_ to see him. But he knew that he stood at his side: Anakin Skywalker. Former Jedi Master, general in the Old Republic’s armies, Darth Vader who was.

And his grandson lay before him.

“I don’t want to do this.” A child’s voice emerged from his throat, tight and frightened and so very very small. “This isn’t my fault. This isn’t my _problem_.”

Ren gave a low murmur, rolled over, subsided back into what seemed an uneasy sleep. Hux wondered at his dreams even as he raised a trembling hand, held it over him. But he did not touch. Instead, he closed his eyes.

Though an only child, Hux had grown up around hundreds of children. He’d never known real friendship despite it. But there had always been the end goal: to rise higher in the ranks than his father. He’d needed no-one else’s approval or encouragement. He’d put it all on himself, and he had succeeded. He had been the one to stand upon the dais before his armies, Starkiller cutting across the sky. He had done it. Not even Ren had been there with him then, choosing to instead remain upon the _Finalizer_.

And thus Hux had been utterly alone at the utter apex of his power. Now, seated beside Ren on the floor, he opened his eyes and stared at the only one who might have made it otherwise.

It had been a mistake, that first time. They’d both known as much. They couldn’t even be certain who had started it, though Hux tended to blame Ren. He rarely denied the accusation. During the latter days of Starkiller’s final construction stages, Ren had “borrowed” certain equipment without asking, bringing completion of the central expulsion vent to a screeching halt.

The original argument had started on the bridge, spilling over into a conference room when the staff there had looked fit to mutiny in utter terror of their lives. And then Hux had punched Ren, breaking three fingers on the blasted helmet; the argument had therefore swiftly transferred to the nearest medical bay, the med techs surrendering their duties to the droids before they themselves ended in need of vital repair.

But Ren had not left it there. He had trailed Hux and his healing injury all the way back to his quarters, and there they had ended in a squirming pile of limbs and fists and scratching scrabbling hands. “Have you even _done_ this before,” Hux had shouted at some careless manoeuvre of mouth on cock; “What were you, the academy _slut_ ,” Ren had returned, when he’d come far too quick and far too hard for anybody with any experience of sex whatsoever.

They hadn’t said much else. They’d just lain there together, on the floor, the stars motionless beyond the great transparisteel windows. They hadn’t spoken about it then. They didn’t speak about it the next day either, even after they ended up fucking in a transport shuttle in the port hangar. Hux had always figured they didn’t need to speak. It wasn’t like it meant anything.

And now, as he lay beside Ren in utter silence, he wished they had learned to talk a long, long time ago.

 

*****

 

Dawn was pressing at the lowest edges of night when he emerged again from the cabin. Kenobi was nowhere in sight, though it did not worry him. Hux did not need to go far to find the Jedi. He was seated at the edge of the forest, watching as large ornithid worked the dead body of an overlarge rodent into a hole of one particularly impressive tree. Presumably it was enough to feed the whole family.

“If I were to contact General Organa, would she be able to see you or Skywalker?”

It had to be one of the few times Hux found himself capable of genuinely surprising the dead man. It degenerated swiftly into a vague disappointment. “I have never spoken with Leia. We did not know each other well in life, and…she never displayed much interest in speaking with Anakin, though Luke encouraged her to try. To some degree she probably never forgave him Alderaan, but even then…” Kenobi was shaking his head, leaving Hux with the distinct impression he spoke aloud only to clear his own tangled thoughts, and not specifically to share them with Hux himself. “Leia is strong in the Force. Stronger than many. But she is not a Jedi, and has no desire to be.”

“Neither am I, and yet we are still talking.”

It had been meant more as sarcasm than actual conversation, yet Kenobi replied with even ease. “I suspect that amulet did something to you.”

Had circumstances been different, Hux would have possibly been intrigued enough to discuss the workings of said amulet, even if the thought of its inherent functioning made his skin crawl. Instead, he just sat down, hard and furious. “ _Fucking_ Ren.”

Too startled to reply, Kenobi stared for a very long moment. Then, he actually chuckled. “He _did_ warn you, if I recall correctly.”

Hux ignored that. It was easier. And he was tired. “Well, what about Luke Skywalker? Because it seems they found him. Or perhaps you knew where he was all along. Why don’t you take this – and Ren – to him?”

Kenobi did not hesitate, voice brooking absolutely no argument. “Luke cannot help him now.”

“What, the hero of the Rebellion? The lone Jedi who brought down the Empire entire?”

The snap of his voice was as an adult telling off a child for swearing. “You know better than most that it was not so simple as that.” In those too-bright eyes, it was as if Hux could see a memory: Jakku, seen from orbit. Hux himself had never been on its surface, but had viewed holovid after holovid as a child at his lessons. He’d dreamed of them, too: those gaping ruined starships, pock-marked hulls like the accusing empty eye sockets of skulls piled high on surrendered battlefields.

“He needs somebody who wasn’t there when he broke.”

Hux looked away, looked up. The ornithid and the rodent were gone. But he couldn’t hear the sound of feasting. He supposed he didn’t have to.

“He doesn’t associate you with what happened to him, then,” Kenobi added. “With what he perceives as his failures.”

Hux’s fingers ached to take up some rock, to lob it through his ghostly head. “The first time we met was in the portside hangar of the _Finalizer_. He’d come aboard in his own Upsilon.” And he looked up, smile harsh as his fair imitation of the vocoder. “The first thing he said to me was _Get in my way, General Hux, and I will ruin you_.”

Such skill did not impress the dead. “But it made no difference to you.”

And Hux scoffed, then scuffed the toe of his ratty shoe in the dirt. The damn things had been ruined long before he’d put them on. “He was Master of the Knights of Ren, yes.” When he glanced up, his eyes had become grey flint. “But the _Finalizer_ was my home. He had no place there.”

“You weren’t afraid of him,” Kenobi agreed, almost too easily. “Even knowing what you know now, you’re still not.”

That gave him pause – the strange kind that settled uneasy in his stomach and made it roil with sudden nausea. “You’re saying that his family was? That they _are_?”

Kenobi gave no reply. From the knowing look in his eyes, he knew perfectly well Hux realised the futility of the rhetorical question. And he looked away, looked up. The unfamiliar skies above were small comfort. As a small child he’d spent hours of his life poring over starcharts. For some unknown reason he’d convinced himself that he could memorise every single system. Even having reached the age of thirty-three, he’d never succeeded at it. But he still had far greater mental recollection of the galaxy than most officers of his age or rank.

 _There are no other officers of your age or rank. Including you_.

A deep breath came easy into his lungs, left just as silently. There was a sleeping man but metres away from him now, watched over by his dead grandfather. He would wake, soon.

“What do I need to do?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” One hand rose, stalled any smart remark. “I’m not being facetious, Brendol. Once you start, you can’t stop.”

“Well, what else do I have left?” And he laughed, low and easy. “No need to answer, we both already know: _nothing_. I’ll never return to my command, and the Resistance will either shoot on sight or parade me about before an unnecessarily public execution, and I have no interest in either of those things. Though the former would be preferable.” Although there was still merit, to the latter – even if he doubted any speeches he’d care to make would be broadcast to those vulnerable to such propaganda. Stretching his legs before him, missing the fine tailoring of his uniform, he added with offhand glee, “So, doing something about an insane Force user? It’ll be entertaining, at least, before I die.”

Kenobi only stared at him. Hux smiled wider.

“I’m sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?”

His own smile was a strikingly lovely thing. “Anakin wondered what Ben saw in you.” One eyebrow arched high. “I think now I know.”

And Hux snorted, pushed a hand back through his hair, and tried again. “Besides, when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. It restores order.” Kenobi’s brow had begun to furrow, and he smiled again. “And while I certainly will likely be dead by the end of this idiocy, I could become a martyr, of sorts. A hero. A legend, perhaps – the general of the First Order who risked everything to stop chaos from bringing down the universe entire.” He tilted his head. “Perhaps they’ll even write songs about me. Holomovies. Children named in my honour growing up to be officers and soldiers themselves, and all that.”

Kenobi was staring at him like he’d just annihilated the Hosnian System for a second time. “I believe I’m going to retract that statement I made earlier about wanting to teach you.”

The laughter this time was true, and clear. It was better than crying. Staring at his hands, he realised that for all he had been promoted to generalhood, he had no idea what he was supposed to do now. In the beginning he had been raised to follow orders, and while he had surpassed all those who gave them, he had still operated within a known system. And now, with no rank and no knowledge, he had no real idea of how to proceed.

“Do you remember your mother?”

The sudden words made him frown, confused. And then he was lurching to his feet, resisting the urge to run screaming. “Oh. Oh, no. _No_.” And he actually shook a finger at a dead man, face very white and eyes wide. “If the next words out of your mouth are _I am your mother_ that’s it. I am slitting my own throat and then I will thoroughly enjoy every second of choking on my own blood.”

The faint chuckle could not mask the sadness inherent in those ancient eyes. “No. No, I doubt it’s so simple.”

His hands had curled to fists, again. “Then why bring it up?”

From the curdled expression, Kenobi clearly wished he hadn’t. Still, he asked. “You don’t remember her well, do you?”

Hux could have walked away from the conversation. If he’d had any damnable sense, he surely would have. “No, I don’t. She died when I was very young.”

“And you don’t recall your parents having a good relationship?”

“Are you in my head?” He spoke pleasantly, softly, an assassin with a gold-hilted knife held to his mark’s throat. “Because if you are, you must be able to sense I don’t appreciate it.”

Kenobi waved a hand, said again, “It’s not quite so simple as that.”

To Hux’s mind, it was. “My father defied love.” Each word was bitten off, hard and forced. “I cannot see how anyone could have loved him. He married my mother because they were genetically compatible and she had a good dowry. I fail to see what more either of them could have expected.”

The piercing gaze cut him deep in places he had not known could be so vulnerable. “You are not what he expected,” Kenobi said, almost gentle. Hux could only look away, mouth twisted, mind trapped on the edge of some precipice he could not risk falling from.

“I am not having this conversation.”

But Kenobi did not appear to believe his participation needed to be in any way voluntary. “I cannot be sure,” he mused, eyes gone dark and dreaming, “but he had…hoped for something else of you, I think. Some other potential he did not quite believe in.”

“ _Stop it_.”

He did. Almost. “Well,” Kenobi said, and actually gave a low chuckle. “The unfortunate truth of the matter is, I’m afraid, that it is the fate of a Kenobi to always be tangled in the tragedies of a Skywalker.”

Hux had never wished so very hard he had never met Kylo Ren. And while he wished it, futile and fuming, Kenobi went ever onward.

“Snoke wanted you to be with Kylo Ren.” He looked upward, but Hux did not think they saw the same stars. “He wanted it because Ben recalled the stories of Obi-Wan and Anakin. And he wanted that. He wanted comradeship. He wanted an equal.” He paused. “He wanted a _friend_.”

His fingers dug into his arms, folded so tight across his chest he could scarcely draw a decent breath. “I’m going to have to get off this planetoid,” Hux said, very clear and very simple. “If I’m to confront Snoke.”

And Kenobi only nodded. “I believe I can assist you in that.” The aged brow furrowed there, expression turning careful and curious both. “What do you plan to do once you find him?”

Hux frowned. “I was hoping you had some idea.”

“I will have to speak more with Anakin,” he said, and his eyes had wandered sideways; Hux would never learn to accustom himself to idea of people he could not himself see. “But at the very least, Snoke will have to be destroyed.”

The very idea how Hux scowling. A degree of security footage had been recovered following the destruction of Starkiller: data that had then been transmitted to orbiting servers, and then routed through to the _Finalizer_. Hux had seen much of it, in the days following the base’s destruction.

He had only watched that particular scene once. They’d already known then that the Resistance had infiltrated the oscillator, that the chain reaction that had shaken the planetoid all to pieces had begun there. But it was something else entirely to watch as Ren confronted one of them. The mask had been removed, and the two figures upon the bridging catwalk had engaged in what appeared a most stilted conversation. It had ended worse – with the flash of Ren’s damnable saber, the hunched body pushed free, spinning wildly into the darkness below.

The noise in the oscillator had been too much to really record the whole conversation. They’d made sense of it somewhat, piecing the audible sections together, but the technicians had ended up dismissing it as a personal confrontation. While they would inevitably be sent to reconditioning for that knowledge, Hux knew it was enough to say Kylo Ren had been distracted and therefore had opened a vulnerability in the base’s defences. Everybody knew the man had a temper.

Hux had read the transcript just once, while listening to the recording. He recalled only one particular thing as relevant now. It had been an academic curiosity, then; a furious disgust at how Ren could have been so distracted as to let Starkiller fall to pieces around him while he complained about his own fool life.

 _I’m being torn apart_.

Hux closed his eyes. “It would be like a lobotomy,” he intoned, very slow, very careful, an engineer examining his schematics. “Would he even recover from that?”

When he opened them again, it was to find Kenobi grimacing down at his own locked hands, expression otherwise unreadable. “Think of it like the excision of a tumour. One so encapsulated that he did not even realise it was there at all.”

That had him frowning; matter could not be destroyed nor created, but its frank removal could not help but leave an empty space in its wake. “He already says he feels incomplete,” he said, very slow. “If we take that from him entirely—”

“We can’t exactly put Snoke back inside him.”

The sharpness of the words actually made him chuckle, dark and irritated. “I’m not going to pretend to have any understanding of the Force, whether from the perspective of a Jedi or anyone else,” he said, cold, calculated, an architect about his work. “But Ren feels broken. Incomplete. From what I’ve observed, _that_ appears to drive his worst impulses. So what happens if I destroy completely the part of him that’s missing? That he may have been searching for even though he doesn’t realise he cast it off in the first place?”

Kenobi remained watchful, but Hux could see the exhaustion, the uncertainty of him. “Snoke is a corruption of what he might have been,” he said, and sounded very nearly gentle. “It is beyond repair, Brendol. Yes, it is part of him. Yes, I daresay he will notice its absence.”

“And yet you say we have to destroy it.”

“Is that not the most logical thing?”

The urge to shout at him burned in his throat, a cacophony of curses and chastisement. But even Hux could not be oblivious to the shifting emotions beneath Kenobi’s mask of calm. Before him sat a man: a _dead_ man. One who had known the choice of logic, versus the choice of the heart. A great Jedi by legend, but for all their protestations of chastity and abstraction, he was one who had struggled in his own self.

And Hux smiled. The curve of his lips upward held back the sting of salt at the corner of damp eyes. “I don’t even know why I care,” he said, unsurprised to find he meant every word. “Snoke has turned to chaos. It is better for the First Order – for the _galaxy_ – that he be destroyed.” And he had to turn his head, chest a tight coil of burning coal and poisoned air. “What else even matters?”

“What else, indeed?”

Such despair in one of such different beliefs might have made him glad, once. Now, Hux felt only bone-deep weariness. “You said you could help me get off this rock. So what do you propose I do?”

Silent, now, Kenobi led them both down towards the lake. The crackle of dead leaves marked every step, stones rolling and chittering beneath his feet. As his breath began to quicken, he breathed deep of the dawning air, crisp and sharp in his lungs. The subsequent tightening in his chest that had little to do with his childhood afflictions, the allergies that plagued him still.

Upon the shore, Kenobi paused, eyes searching over the still surface; only the faintest wind moved the canopy above and behind. “You can’t go anywhere just yet,” he said, and jerked his head to the left, as if he’d heard something far beyond Hux’s reach. “Anakin has yet to work out where Snoke is, and what can be done to…unmake him, as it were.” Glancing over, his expression remained unreadable when he said, carefully light, “This is information he hopes to take from Ben’s mind.”

Hux had long ago lost count of interrogations undertaken by Kylo Ren in the chambers of the _Finalizer_ ; he could not even recall how many of them he himself had observed, both in reality and by recording. And the sideways look this earned him from Kenobi held the harsh unwanted weight of genuine pity.

“It does not always have to be like that.”

And that brought other memories, and these almost worse: Ren, with his forehead pressed to Hux’s own, their bodies joined, breath coming hard and fast. Although it had been his own dick pressed up inside Ren, he recalled more clearly the sensation of Ren inside his mind. Even as Hux thrust hips, pressed lips to skin and drew nails down the long expanse of his spine, Ren had shifted inside his thoughts, curious and probing, a contradictory calm even as his great broad body had surrendered itself to orgasm and release beneath Hux’s hands.

The shadows hid the high flush of his cheeks. And Hux did not break his military stride. He knew the terrain well enough to keep his rhythm.

Instead he kept his eyes upon the black waters, though a distant cluster of light caught his attention, strange and bright in his peripheral vision. Fireflies. He had never seen them before. They were larger than he’d had imagined, and brighter, too; they shifted in silence, an unknown pattern worked into the fabric of waning night.

He did not even realise how lost he had become in them until the sigh at his side shocked him back to attention.

“Brendol.” And there was apology, there, somewhere; slow and cautious, but true all the same. “I will need your help to do this,” he added, and for some reason began pressing back his sleeves from the gnarled skin of his strong hands. “And it must be done now, while Ben is still unconscious. Such expenditure of the Force, and so close to him, would alert him to the fact something is not as he would expect.”

His spine straightened, from jaw to pelvis, in an unconscious return to arms. “What do you want to do?” Already, he knew. Every step he took now was a movement into the unknown. Hux kept his head high, and his footfall steady, as he stepped closer yet to the darkened waters.

With one hand raised, Kenobi waved it over the lake; Hux stiffened, though not so much as a stray ripple disturbed its ordered surface. The expression upon Kenobi’s face could have been called wistful, had it not been something primarily closer to determination. “There is only so much I can do, in the form I now inhabit.” He turned to Hux, one thick eyebrow raised. “Often, I can do nothing to affect the physical plane.”

“If you’re suggesting _I_ raise the smuggler’s ship, I hope Ren is going to be out for the next week, because it’s going to take that long for me to do something like that.”

“No, it won’t.” He stepped forward, eyes unblinking and so very, very blue. “But you will need to trust me.”

Hux stepped back. “A dead Jedi who needs me to kill the person whose cause I’ve been dedicated to almost since birth, who as it turns out is not a person, but a construct of a mad child with power beyond his own control.” And he smiled, very bright, and very very brittle. “What’s not to trust?”

The advance had stopped; but the odd fondness on his face now was far worse. “Brendol.”

And he turned away. The last person who had used his given name with any regularity had been the first Brendol Hux himself. And yet Hux had never known anything approaching the kindness set into it now. “What do you need me to do?” he asked, muffled; Kenobi did not move forward, but the simple sound of his voice could have echoed about the galaxy entire.

“Trust.”

“Yes, we’ve been over that.”

“Not entirely.” Kenobi stood close enough that had he been alive, Hux would have felt the warmth of him. “It’s very important that you understand just one thing.” Somehow, the gaze of the dead could be far more penetrating than that of the living. “You need to let me in.”

Ren’s mind, when it had brushed up against his own, had always been a strange and colourful thing; a swirl of chaotic colour, the kind of disorder he hated most, and yet, could not turn away from. “You want in my head?” he asked, slow to mask the uncertainty; Kenobi’s answer was almost too quick, and Hux wondered what the Jedi was attempting to mask himself.

“No, we need more than that.” Here he paused; Hux recognised the look, as he himself often wore it when he struggled to translate some military jargon into a simple overview for a civilian contractor. “It’s…not possession, exactly. But it will feel like it.”

The electric sensation was purely imagined, but no less unpleasant for it. “You want to use my body.”

“You will be in control,” Kenobi said, the lack of denial burning at the forefront of Hux’s mind. “I will simply be giving you access to my training, to my knowledge, to my affinity with the Force. As long as we do not prolong the contact, it will be enough to lift the ship.” Now he cleared his throat, but did not look away. “And if we are cautious of those limits, it should have no lasting effect on you.”

“This is all very comforting.” The blank, wordless stare of the dead Jedi had him squirming within seconds. “Oh, all _right_. How do we begin?”

Apparently, it was by sitting before the lake, legs crossed, hands palm upward and limp upon his thighs. Hux was under the impression such position was in some way supposed to somehow be calming, relaxing. Even with generations of Jedi to prove it, he still had no idea why they’d think that. In the end he supposed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like they needed him to believe in Jedi nonsense anyway. It wasn’t like he wanted to, either.

And yet, Kenobi sat beside him in a serene calmness Hux couldn’t help but envy. His breathing came slow and even, an easy rhythm that should have led to his own peace. It didn’t. It bothered him instead. The old man was dead; he shouldn’t be breathing. There was absolutely no need for him to be breathing. Why was he _breathing_.

“Brendol.” For a moment Hux felt like a scolded child; the faint amusement that entered Kenobi’s words a moment later didn’t help in the slightest. “Calm your mind.”

Even as he tried to restructure his thoughts into something solid and yielding both, his hands moved quite of their own volition. In his laps, they met, clasped, and then his palms began to press together, rubbing over and over in quickening slide.

“Brendol.”

Something in him snapped, tight and taut and hard even as his hands stopped dead. “ _Hux_.” His voice rasped over the single syllable. “Please call me _Hux_.”

His own eyes remained fixed upon the lake; he could taste salt as Kenobi stared at him in utter silence. “Hux,” he said, at last, and it was no testing of waters; it was a call to attention, followed by an order. “Think of the ship.”

The _Finalizer_ materialised in his mind: sleek and massive, her triangular form cutting through the vacuum of space like a hot knife through tender flesh. His entire body trembled as he shoved the memory aside, replaced it with the smuggler’s shuttle. With but a little effort, a little ruthless disregard, he could formulate the thing in his head in rough cross-section, an engineer’s working model.

“Very good.” Kenobi’s low voice came to him as from across great distance. Hux had never been so glad of the separation. “Now: picture the lake.”

Deep. Dark. The cool mineral taste began to fill his mouth, his eyes, his ears, his throat—

“No.” The voice shook him from the illusion, a hand reaching into the depths, catching him about the scruff of his neck, pulling him gasping to the surface. “No,” he said, again. “You are on land. You are safe.” And again he paused, and the low voice took on a melodious tone close to hypnotic. “And soon, you will be in the sky.”

Hux released a trembling breath, caught it again upon the memory of the bridge beneath his feet. The hum of the ship’s great engines had started there, had reverberated through the thick insulated soles of his regulation boots, shivering up his spine to settle low in his mind. The command bridge had been so very far from the central reactor, from the drives that propelled her through space: and yet he knew them. He knew her great beating heart as intimately as he’d ever known his own.

“Hux.” For the first time, he heard strain in the old man’s voice. “Don’t… _move_.”

A sudden supernova burst of pain rocked through him with the abruptness of nuclear strike; every nerve ending caught alight, flared with bright agony. The screams started a second later, though his voice wore itself to silence within the first few moments. His entire body burned from the inside out, as if he had thrown himself upon the _Finalizer_ ’s great pyre after all. But in this Hux found no comfort, no peace. Only torment awaited him here. The slightest movement, and he arched in renewed suffering; his skin crisping, falling away. Fat layers bubbled as they lay exposed, eyes expanding, boiling to the point of bursting. And now, even with lungs charred and crumbled, vocal chords torn, still he screamed.

Then, as sudden as it started: it stopped. Hux fell forward from his seated position, curled in upon himself as if that would hold his baked flesh to his charred bones. His cheeks were damp, the blood not yet evaporated as he rocked, back and forth – and a strange sound, like sobbing, reverberated through the ache of his mind. Sobbing. _His_ sobbing. And then he was on his knees, stumbling, falling, collapsing into the lake and its cool, dark, _not burning_ water.

“Hux.” Underneath the surface, he couldn’t hear anything. “ _Hux_.” But even as he gasped in air, ready to go under again, the words held him still. “Hux, it’s all right. It’s over. You’re not…you were never burning. You’re safe. _Hux_!”

And he turned, violent and gasping, eyes wide and hands in thick fists. “What did you _do_ to me?”

Kenobi stood upon the shore of the lake, expression darkly troubled, lines pressed to a thin line. “You did it to yourself.” But he gave no accusation to the words. Hux did not sense even pity. All that was left to him now was simple sorrow. “That is how you imagine the Force to be,” Kenobi said, and now it truly was sorrow, the sighted man trying to describe stars to a blind man. And he whispered when he said, “You burn and burn and burn. And you never go out.”

His hair dangled in his eyes, thick with water that broke free, coursed down his cheeks like freshwater tears. The cool caress of it could have invoked true saltwater, had he even remembered how to cry. Instead he stared in silence at his hands before him: darkened by sun, chapped and callused by his work. But they were intact. They remained unburnt.

They were his own, and he was alive.

And he glanced up, sharp and sudden, neck aching at the whipcord speed of it. The smuggler’s ship rose above him on the stony shore, dripping dark water in relentless pit-pat. Lakeweed festooned her hull, while a few surprised fish flopped about her landing gear. She was junk, indeed, but space-worthy junk.

Perhaps Kenobi read his mind. Or perhaps they were beyond that, now. “As far as I can ascertain, she will fly.” And his snort was low, somewhere between sorrow and laughter. “What could water do to her, if she could survive the vacuum of space?”

Hux smiled. “Indeed.” It curdled but a moment later, and he knew his pallor would match the most spoiled of milk. “But if you’ll excuse me a moment, I need to go throw up.”

He stumbled to get there, balance rolling, every step an exercise in learning to walk again. He still managed to be both neat and quiet, completing his business in the scrubby bushes near the treeline. When he came back, he found Kenobi staring out across the lake. Though his mouth tasted of bile and old caf, the thought of the lakewater turned his stomach. He could not put it in his mouth again.

“When will Ren awaken?” he asked, instead; Kenobi did not look at him.

“Not until morning, at the earliest.”

That left nothing more to say – or so it seemed they had both decided. Even with the ache in his head, the uneasy rolling gait of his walk, Hux climbed into the ship and slipped into the pilot’s ragged seat. Wrinkling his nose at the stench, he reached for the navcom. And there, he paused.

He could just leave. It would be the work of a moment to set coordinates further than any he had ever explored, to send himself into some darkness far beyond the reach of Skywalkers, of even their blasted beloved Force. But Hux had never once blindly walked into the dark. From the very beginning his life had been simulations and preset paths along academic and command chains. Setting forth without a goal was a skill he had never thought to master.

 Hux manoeuvred the craft with some difficulty; the aged controls proved just clunky enough, and he had rarely needed to pilot beyond his years of training. Hiding such a lumbering thing ought to have been difficult. But Ren did not know he would be looking for it. It seemed enough to conceal her within the forest, a ghost slumbering amongst the tall trees, the dawn-streaked sky unseen overhead.

Hux did not go back to the beach. Aching, white-knuckled, he lurched through the faint quiet of the forest and to the cabin. It was almost too easy to ignore the open door to Ren’s room. His own, he closed tight behind him. And there, still damp from the lake, his stomach a roiling mess, he lay down upon the neatly-made lines of his pallet. He had not even taken his boots off.

But Hux closed his eyes. And then, he slept.

 

*****

 

Hux caught no sign of Ren, come noon. Instead he stood outside the cabin in his borrowed socks with a ceramic mug between ice-cold hands, and wondered why it mattered. Then he simply sipped the tea and pretended not to think. It didn’t help. Ren had brought boxes upon boxes of it, and Hux was well aware that Ren hated the stuff. Drinking deep of it now, he attempted to savour the taste, but still his mind would not quiet. He’d developed a fondness for it back in the earliest days of his officer training. He rarely went anywhere without some supply to hand.

Ren had known that, too.

As he began to pace out towards the lake, Hux pointedly ignored the area where he had put the ship. He could only hope that Kenobi had told Skywalker of it, and that Skywalker would direct Ren away if it came to that. But given the state Ren had been in the night before, it seemed unlikely to become an issue. At least it appeared Skywalker had managed to get him out of bed. There were days when Hux hadn’t been able to do even as little as that, back on the _Finalizer_.

He kept staring at the sky, even when he became aware of the odd presence of Kenobi at his side; a disturbance in the neat reality of the world he had once known. “Are you ready?”

“It hasn’t come back.”

He heard rather than saw Kenobi frown. “What do you mean?”

“The aurora.” Covering his confusion with the last sip of his tea didn’t work, and he clenched the mug tightly enough between his hands that he felt the slightest give in its shape. “I…it doesn’t matter. It just bothers me.”

In the cold light of day, Kenobi should have appeared washed out, less real. And yet, his thoughtful expression was the clearest thing Hux could see. And then he was turning away, looking back to the cabin. “You need to leave as soon as possible,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Anything Ben says otherwise is irrelevant.”

“But Ren already said I could go.” And then he frowned, glanced in the direction of the unseen ship. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes.” And for the first time genuine impatience entered the dead man’s voice. “But you can’t have him following you. If you allow him to summon another shuttle, then he has the means to accompany you.”

“And he would do it, too.” He didn’t bother resisting the urge to kick at the cold fire, sending ashes and dust into the air. “The damned great idiot.”

The faint smile Kenobi wore was of the type best suited to smug corpses. “It is a Skywalker trait, I’m afraid.”

“Why did you do it?” He spoke too harsh, and too sharp. But then it wasn’t as if he cared. “Stay with the Skywalkers, I mean. When you say things like that.”

At first, he only stared. And then he turned away. “I was taken to the Jedi Temple in Coruscant when I was very young,” he said, voice controlled and steady. “And I became padawan to a Jedi Master well-known for instinct. Many Jedi saw the Force strictly as prescribed by the tenets of the Council. But Master Jinn, he…” His voice faltered, for the first real time since they had begun to speak. “He allowed the Force to flow through him. To act through him. And…and the Skywalkers are very strong in the Force. To those such as my master, as me myself…a Skywalker is so very close to the Force. We can hardly deny its call.”

The remembered agony of the Force, directed through Kenobi and into his own body, could be nothing compared to the reality of it. And yet the recollection was enough to have his skin turning to ice, stomach twisted up in terror. “You must realise I can’t understand that.”

“And you must realise I don’t expect you to.”

In the silence that followed, Hux wandered back into the cabin, setting the mug aside to wash later. Only after retrieving his shoes, and a semi-respectable sweater, did he emerge again. Kenobi had taken up his usual place by the fire, knees apart, hands dangling, eyes fixed upon the pit as if he could scry from flames that didn’t even exist. Hux supposed he could allow that. It wouldn’t have been the strangest thing he’d seen recently.

“So. I need to distract Ren.” Settling down across from the dead man, he snorted. “I don’t suppose you could just knock him out again?”

“He actually knocked _himself_ out,” Kenobi replied, with an arch look that Hux took as not an absolute negative declaration. “But there is another way.”

“Oh?”

A slight discomfort had entered his pose now; he moved a little too much, eyes again fixed on the ashes of the previous night’s fire. “You perhaps won’t much care for it. But it’s very effective.” Here he coughed, hands once again disappearing back into his sleeves. “Call it…a clusterbomb of thought.”

“A mind trick.”

“Yes.” Again, he paused; there was nothing difficult in his words, but he struggled over them all the same. “Obviously, you cannot do it yourself, having no skill or sensitivity with the Force.”

“I can’t have you work through me again.” He was smiling, even as something in him started screaming. “I _can’t_.”

“You wouldn’t have to.” Leaning back, eyes squinting, Kenobi sighed. “I can lay a trap in your mind. And if you open that part of your mind, when you are close, it will rebound on him, cause him to retreat in upon himself, for a time.”

Suspicion had him speaking very flat, and very slow. “When we are _close_.”

“Intimacy is the only way to make this happen. It is why you would not often see it used, in any real military capacity, shall we say. Both minds must be very open and relaxed for this to work.”

“ _Intimacy_.” The word rolled around his mouth, hard and pointed. “You’re saying I have to have sex with him.”

“Don’t you already?”

The flush crept up his face in a well-trod path of relentless humiliation. “Not recently, no.”

And though his own voice remained even, light, Kenobi did refuse to meet his gaze. “There are other ways. But given your own lack of natural ability with the Force – and the fact he’d notice very quickly even if you did try to persuade him in other ways – it’s the simplest.”

He didn’t bother holding it his snort, cheeks now badly aflame. “But hardly the least messy.”

Kenobi didn’t say anything. And Hux felt his nails digging into palms; he glanced down, attempted to loosen the fists he didn’t even recall forming.

“We haven’t had sex since we got here,” he said, finally, hating how small and faltering his voice had become. “It’ll make him suspicious.”

“Haven’t you?”

And now, he who had stood before armies and murdered millions, could do nothing more but bury his face in his hands. “That didn’t count. We were _fighting_.” And then he sat bolt upright, now going very white, lips pressed flat and furious. “He did it to me, didn’t he.” One foot kicked out, caught a stone in the ring about the firepit, sent it ricocheting across the clearing. “When we had sex that last time on the _Finalizer_. He knocked me out with some cheap Jedi mindtrick!” But not even the flare of anger could overcome the memory of the quickfire beat of his multiple orgasms. With head in his hands again, Hux bent forward from the waist, groaned, and wished he were dead.

“He actually did just outright drug you.” Kenobi had the gall to sound apologetic. “But from what I understand, he did make you more…amenable, to things, while he was at it.”

“Like I said, there are _reasons_ why people hated the Jedi,” he said, muffled, too mortified to ever show his face again. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

“Come, Hux. Let us do this.” And when he did not move, he added with the clear beginnings of irritation, “Anakin is bringing Ben back. They’ve been training, but it’s over.”

“We’re doing this _now_?”

“There is no time.” There was little of the old man in him now, or the teacher; all had hardened into the durasteel will of a general surveying his battlefield. “Ben has summoned a shuttle for you to take. You must be away from here before it arrives.”

“Are you coming with me?” Immediately he raised a hand, waved the sound away as if it could take it back. “Stupid question.”

“It isn’t,” Kenobi said, strangely quiet. “Though in truth, neither Anakin nor myself understand why the two of us can speak in this way. But away from this planetoid, strong in the Force as it is, that tenuous hold would likely break.”

The aurora had been like that; strangely present, and then: just gone. “It was a stupid question,” he repeated. And then he closed his eyes. “But thank you for answering it.”

Kenobi said no more. Hux told himself he didn’t care. Sitting before the cold fire, he breathed, slow and careful, listened to the faint sound of small birds, somewhere high in the trees. They sounded like they were fighting over something. Food, perhaps. A nest. Or perhaps they were just playing. It wasn’t as if he had any way of knowing, at all.

A faint weight settled upon his shoulders; the warmth of it utterly at odds with its thickness. He glanced up as he used one hand to hold it closed at his throat, blinking up into the light. Silhouetted by the distant sun, Ren swallowed hard.

“You looked cold.”

Hux blinked. “Hello, Ren.”

For one long and dreadful moment, Hux thought Ren might actually turn and walk away. And then he dropped down with an utter lack of grace, heavy and gangling beside him. “I can organise for you to leave,” he said, sudden and too fast. “Maybe even give you a bit of…cover, I guess. Just to get you out to the Unknown Regions. I mean, I know it is the stronghold of the First Order, but they don’t control all the territory. And I bet you memorised every damn system there, when…when you were general.”

“Yes.” His voice cracked. There was no point in hiding it. “I did.”

The firepit lay empty before them. It was not truly cold, here at the meridian of the day and with the gaberwool blanket about his shoulders, but still he shivered.

And Ren drooped before him: the attack dog of the First Order, reduced to a bowed mess of black fabric and pale skin. “I’m sorry,” he said, sudden and broken. “About…about _everything_.”

When he’d been a child, Hux had liked to take the quilted cover from his small bed, wrapping it about his shoulders like a great robe of state. With a stylus in hand, he’d patrolled the small corridors of his parents’ assigned apartment, imagining a galaxy bowed down before his imperial might. And now he rose, blanket held firmly about his shoulders, and wondered when that child had died. Long after the one that had been named Ben Solo, surely.

“It wasn’t all bad,” he said, very soft. And when he laid his hand upon one stiff shoulder the blanket fluttered away, forgotten. “Ren,” he repeated, and earned a sigh.

“No.” The shoulder shifted beneath his touch; drawing away, surrendering, pushing back into his fingers. “No, I guess not.”

Whatever plans had been made did not matter. His smile was genuine where he lowered his hand, twisted his fingers about Ren’s own, pulled tight. “Come with me.”

His gaze snapped up, eyes narrowed, body tensing in a way that said something for the extensive combat training he had undergone. “What?”

“I want to have sex with you.” At Ren’s boggling expression, he laughed outright, and meant it. “We’re good at that, at least. Together. So: one more for the road, and all that.”

“I don’t think so.”

Even when he’d seen Ren at his worst, he’d suspected something like this lay beneath that exoskeleton of tempered furious power. But he had never expected it to extract from him tenderness, rather than scorn. “I can’t read your mind, Ren,” he said, and dug his nails deep enough into Ren’s knuckles to really hurt. “But I know what you want: me, on my knees, your hands in my hair and your cock in my mouth.”

“ _Hux_.”

The blown-wide circles of his pupils made him chuckle, leaning close to whisper against one warm ear. “We’re grown men. We’ve reached an accord.” And he wondered why it hurt, when he said, soft as silk, “We can do what we like, until it ends. So why don’t we?”

Hux led him back to the command shuttle. The idea of sex in the cabin struck him as somehow distasteful, and he preferred to circumvent entirely the one memory of their scrabbling strange sex on the shore of the lake. _That_ had really been something between frottage and mutual masturbation, and hardly something on which to base a romantic parting. Or so Hux figured. Ending entanglements of this sort weren’t usually so fraught in his world; they usually consisted of _thank you for your time and the adequate sexual congress_ and that was that.

But then, his previous “entanglements” had never stretched so long. And Ren had always been an anomaly aboard the First Order’s flagship anyway.

In the cabin, he seated Ren upon the narrow bed, and went down on his knees between his thighs. Ren had very pleasant thighs, indeed, and Hux had gained had some skill with cock-sucking during a long ago during adolescence spent in barracks and dormitories. But Ren remained limp in his hand and between his lips. Sitting back on his heels, scowling, he poked Ren fiercely in the stomach. Ren did not move, body curved forward in frank exhaustion. Even at such awkward angle Hux could see the dark smudges under his darker eyes, the misery writ in the long lines of his great body.

And before Hux could demand anything of him, he stirred, then capitulated. “You don’t really want me,” he said, low and flat. “You just…”

And Hux snorted, licked at drying lips. “Yes. I don’t want you at all. Which completely explains why I am trying to get into your trousers.”

“ _Hux_.”

“Ren.” With a crackle of joints, Hux winced, pushed himself to his feet. Almost immediately he dropped again, not hesitating to shove at Ren so he could sit beside him on the tiny bunk. “All right, I can basically _hear_ the nonsense turning over in your head, and I want to point out something to you.”

Ren said nothing, his too large eyes watchful and wary. That was typical of him, to only keep quiet when Hux could have made something out of his usual idiot conversation. And he rolled his eyes, wondered at his own mistakes, and went on.

“You are not the most handsome man I have ever slept with, no.” And when Ren’s shoulders drooped, he poked him hard again, this time right in the bowcaster scar. “But I only slept with that particular man once, and though he was indeed quite something to look at, I become rather bored with him after he spent much of the encounter just _lying_ there. Apparently he was under the belief that his beauty alone would be sufficient to suck my cock to satisfaction.”

Ren looked up from beneath his ridiculous eyelashes; it did nothing to hide the faint curl of a smile on his generous lips. “So you didn’t see him again?”

“No.” And then, just because he was doomed already, “I rarely bother with anything beyond once or twice, with anybody.”

“But you’ve lost count.” The quiet voice could have been satisfied, or even just confused. “With me.”

“Do I look like the type to lose count?”

This time he straightened, looked Hux directly in his eyes. “I think maybe you wanted to.”

The startled laughter rang too loud in the close quarters of the shuttle. Shaking his head, Hux ducked his face, knew it didn’t hide the rising flush. “Ren,” he said, and allowed one hand to move forward, to close about the firm thigh pressed up against his own. “I am with you, here. Now. And while the circumstances are outright ridiculous, it does not change the fact I have willingly slept with you in the past, and would do so again.”

Ren climbed to his feet, though as he crossed the shuttle, he did not make for the exit. “Ren?” he asked, though he knew even before he reached for the wall console. “… _honestly_?”

When he turned back, dressed only in a light shirt and opened trousers, he’d crossed his arms over that broad chest. “It’s not like I dated when I was young,” he said, very slow. “But I’m pretty sure I’m the jealous type.”

In truth, Hux could barely remember the fellow cadet he’d snogged to the damned song that now drifted from unseen speakers. He’d been a good kisser, if nothing else. And probably _had_ been nothing else, considering Hux’s lack of recollection. “My father always hated this song,” he said instead, still seated on the edge of the bed. “I can’t even remember _why_.”

“It’s from the New Republic.”

“Yes, well, that could have been enough.” Hux had cocked his head without even thinking of it, following the melody, the easy cadence of the lyrics. It was about a brilliant woman, one who had died young; it had been a broken heart, lost to a secret lover. Or so the song went. Hux shook his aching head, wondered at the youth that had thought the hokey theme even the slightest bit appealing. “How did we even _have_ it? But then, I suppose children do love their contraband.”

Ren actually had to cover his gigantic mouth with both hands to smother his laughter. Hux turned on him with a harsh glare, eyes rolled to the ceiling.

“ _What_?”

It was a long moment before Ren found equilibrium enough to speak; even then, the words held the slight tremor of withheld hilarity. “You sound like such an old man. _Children love contraband_. Kriff, it sounds like some First Order slogan, to remind loyalists not to let their children so much as sneeze the wrong way in case it turns them into a rebel.”

Hux scowled, folded his arms across his chest, ignored the swell of feeling there as the stupid song hit its first true crescendo. “Do you want to get laid or not?”

It had come out harsher than he’d quite intended. And yet, Ren’s sudden sobering had little to do with that. “They’re not dead,” he said, sudden and slow. Hux blinked up at him, heart a strange coil in his chest.

“What?”

“Phasma. Mitaka. Unamo. Some other officers, several legions of Stormtroopers. Some enlisted soldiers, too.”

He’d stood without realising, now but a few moments from Ren. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, hands trembling at his sides. Ren’s throat, broad and marked here and there with dark moles, worked hard as he swallowed.

“I didn’t…I sent them away.” Now his dark eyes skipped sideways, back, a wild animal in a trap of its own construction. “Like you said, it seemed…wasteful. And you…you liked them.”

“Wait.” His fingers curled in Ren’s collar, drew them nose to nose; even at this distance, his voice only continued to rise in volume. “You’re saying you didn’t kill the entire crew of the _Finalizer_?”

The miserable expression upon his idiot face was of one bearing terrible news, rather than good. “Well, most of them. But…”

He wanted to kiss him. He wanted to kill him. But Hux did neither, turning away until he found the bed again, sitting down before his weakened knees could send him crashing to the floor.

“You could go back to them.” Ren remained across the room, hunched over, made surprisingly small for his great size. “They’re not far, from here.”

Hux squeezed his eyes tightly shut, bit down on the wave of disorientation, the nausea that accompanied it. “They’re back with the First Order, surely?”

“No.” Light footsteps crossed the short space between them, and he heard rather than saw Ren go to his knees before him. “Snoke thinks them dead. They’ve taken advantage of that.” And he sighed, voice tremulous, very nearly tender even in his grief. “You could go to them. They’d…they’re yours. They’d take you back.”

He opened his eyes. Kylo Ren knelt before him, eyes very wide, long face a book torn cruelly open, pages ripped from front and back, leaving the central story a strange and ruined thing. His throat choked upon tears he didn’t know how to shed, fury warring with sudden hot gratitude.

“Hux,” he said. And his hands closed upon his face, held him still. For a long moment Hux only stared at him. He was no mindreader. But he could see no lies, not here, not upon the face of this person who destroyed with one hand and gave back with the other.

 _As if you are any better, Brendol Hux_.

His mouth closed over his, hot and wanting. The kiss burned them both, but neither drew back, not until all oxygen had been exhausted; Ren panted hard against his lips, eyes wide and dark, when Hux at last let him go.

“ _Hux_.”

“Ren.” And he pushed him back, just a little, just enough. “Take your clothes off.”

The way Ren gazed upon him now was too open, too trusting. It awakened a coil of something in his gut, slithering and uneasy. Hux supposed it was guilt, given its unfamiliar curves and the fresh burn of its unknown venom. But he was already stripping off his own clothing, not caring for tidiness, for protocol. Rising from the bed he then crossed the room, bending forward to forage in a locker. When he turned back it was to find Ren, now naked, sitting upon the small bed with a face flushed entirely red, mouth half-opened. His expression had become something between misery and unexpected ecstasy.

“…were you staring at my _ass_?”

Ren just blinked, very rapidly; he’d always been a poor liar, especially when caught out before he could even try. It was a long moment before he actually replied, though to his credit he managed a surprising modicum of dignity. “It’s a very nice ass.”

“Well, all this running around in the forest can’t have done it any harm.” Before Ren could say another word, Hux returned to his side. There was no use in delaying the inevitable; the moment he settled he surged forward, upward; with their mouths closed together, one hand cradling his jaw, he allowed his fingers to slip back into the long dark hair hair. “Come, Ren,” he whispered against still lips. “You can touch me.”

His movements had turned shy, now. One over-large hand was almost clumsy where it moved into his lap, gently closing around his cock. Hux used his free hand to hand him the lubricant, felt its cool slipperiness against his skin a moment later.

Hux leaned into him, his other hand gentling up and down his side, as if calming some great beast he had a mind to saddle and ride. A smile crept across his face; possibly that was not so far from the truth, come the end of all things.

Ren’s hand, supple and slick now, ghosted around his cock before sweeping down to first finger over his balls, and then dip lower still. Despite the known path, uncertainty dogged every careful motion. Hux ignored it for the moment, kissed him instead; he had moved now to his throat, bruising pale skin as Ren pushed his head back, eyes wide, voice opening and closing on unspoken words. So far there had been no hint of any of his usual habit of trying to creep inside his mind. Hux swallowed around the lump in his throat, kissed him again. There would be time enough for that, yet.

But this…this could be different. Just once. Just this last time.

The first time they’d fucked, both of them had come away with actual injuries. This last time, by contrast, had an odd and delicate quality about its strange moments. While beside each other, Hux still felt as though Ren lingered elsewhere, the strange vulnerability of him keeping them far separate. Ren could drag a man halfway across a room with nothing but the power of his mind, could cut down younglings and adults alike, had destroyed an entire ship from the petty concerns of a broken part of his own mind, and yet…

“There’s good in you, Ren.” Each word came as a whispered invocation, slow and steady against the tremor of his skin. “You shouldn’t fight it – and not merely for the fact it is _good_. It’s part of you. You would be happier, if you accepted it.”

He drew back as if slapped, eyes very wide, mouth working and strange. “What?”

“You call yourself Kylo Ren.” He did not look away, as casual and cutting in his truth speaking as a seer. “You’re still Ben Solo in there, somewhere.”

“Hux.” Long hands closed about his arms, braceleting them in blooming bruise. “Get off me.”

“No.” And he crowded him close, one hand on his waist just over the bowcaster scar; as Ren winced, he fisted the other in his hair, pulled tight. “I’m not a nice person. You _know_ that. I burned five planets to stardust and if I was given half the chance, I’d do it again. If it meant the galaxy would be better for it.” And he leaned close, took his lower lip between his teeth, and bit down. Hard. “The problem is, _Ben_ , is that the galaxy would also be better if you were still in it.”

And his face crumpled, blood leaking from his mouth like tears. “ _Hux_.”

“Be quiet, Ren.” And he kissed him, tasted salt and iron. “Just be quiet and fuck me.”

It could, of course, not be so simple as all that. Ren was not actually crying, but the shudder of his great body, the dampness of his eyes, the strange distance of him – all spoke to the fact that perhaps somewhere, somehow, some part of him sobbed like a child.

Still Hux pushed him down, back upon the narrow bed of the shuttle, and leaned down. Resting his whole weight over him, a pale freckled blanket, he kissed him long, and slow. With hands cradled around his face, he worked in wordless arc, over and across and down the plains of his face and throat and chest. But the moment he felt the curious probe of Ren’s mind, he shoved him right back into his own.

“No.” And again, his teeth teased over the quickfire pulse in his bared thoat. “Let me show you. Like this.”

Ren took the hint, eventually; as their cocks began a careful slide against each other, one large hand moved to cup his ass, knowing and proprietary. It held for but a moment there, then the blunt tips of two fingers curved forward over one cheek, pressing against the tight furl between. But there was nothing forced, nothing rough in any of it; instead he worked at him with that odd patience Hux so rarely saw in him. But then, he had in the past watched Ren about his forms and katas for hours on end. In those long hours he had taken no pause – not for rest, nor for sustenance. When he pleased, Ren could be the most single-minded creature Hux had ever known.

And then he chuckled, his entire body so overcome by laughter that Hux had to sit up straight, bracing himself against the hull. And as he glared down, Ren blinked. And then started laughing, again.

“Your _beard_.”

Tightening his thighs, Hux scowled, one hand rising reflexively to his chin. “What?”

“It _tickles_.”

With a snort Hux leaned forward, scraped it along the side of his face, down his throat. The squirming this elicited very nearly knocked him free. Hux stilled him first with a slap to one thickly muscled thigh, and then just dug fingertips deep into his shoulders. Ren squirmed harder, then subsided, eyes fixed upon his face.

“It suits you,” he said, strikingly genuine for a man naked on his back, throat and chest chafed red. “You should keep it.”

He smiled, even when it hurt. “I probably will.”

“And your hair.” One hand rose, fell away before it could touch. “And I like it. When you smile.”

The ache of him was a star on the verge of utter collapse. “ _Ren_.”

The long fingers pressed into him without further invitation; Hux gasped, rising slightly with their inward motion. Then, almost inevitable, he pushed back, and down. And Ren was smiling, curling them inside. His own cock pressed hard against his belly as he reached between them, began to slick Ren’s hot length.

And it felt like falling, when Hux raised his hips and pushed down onto him. The drag of it came at first as a sudden vicious burn. Hux did not stop. He had been a ranking officer in the First Order. He was no cadet, to whine and cry about a little pain, a little effort. Only when Ren fit completely inside did he lean down, whole weight upon him, and press their lips together.

He ended up having no real memory of what happened, at least in any logical sense. It became but a kaleidoscope of broken images; from time to time, everything seemed to shift, one moment sliding seamless into the next. Rocking upon him, cockhead over prostate; the drag of his cock against the hard muscle of Ren’s twitching abdomen; one overlarge hand, clasped about his ass; a long finger, following his dick inside, rubbing against cock and prostate together; hair damp and tangled as a neck bent back; curled toes seeking purchase in thin sheets as fingers dug into hips; the drag of his beard, and the taste of fresh blood in its tingling wake.

 _I love you_.

Thoughts, words, some fool dream: Hux had no idea where it came from, _who_ it came from. But despite that, Ren came hard and first, gasping into his mouth; Hux felt the heat of his own release between their bellies a beat later, even as Ren poured himself into him.

After, in the drowsing dark, Hux did not move. With his head pillowed upon his chest, he gazed into the middle distance and regretted every moment, even as he luxuriated in the same. Not even in their quietest moments aboard the _Finalizer_ had he permitted this. Neither had Ren ever asked. Yet he found something oddly natural in lying upon him, ear to chest, listening as the great heartbeat slowed to a regular pace.

And it was perhaps a mistake, to speak of it here, to speak of it now. But then Kenobi had never said he could not broach the subject.

“How long has Snoke been talking to you?”

“What?”

The ambient air temperature had dropped sharply; even as the proof of it shivered across his skin, Hux shrugged, and did not retreat. “It started when you were a child. Didn’t it.”

“Yes.” Ren rolled his shoulders, but not enough to dislodge him. “Why are you asking me this?”

“I’m curious.” Propping himself up, Hux balanced his chin on one hand; then he grimaced, feeling their come drying already between them. It would be uncomfortable, later. But then they didn’t have much of a _later_ left to them anyway. “You always said you were doing the work of your grandfather. Of Darth Vader,” he said, eyes narrowed, his other hand light upon the bowcaster scar upon Ren’s side. He began to trace lazy circles there as he said, very soft, “Did you ever speak with Darth Vader, when you were young?”

Ren winced – though if it were from the question, or the tickle of fingertips over sensitive skin, he could not tell. “Hux.”

He dragged a nail, light, over the most sensitive of spots. “Answer the question.”

“No.” Slapping his hand away, Ren screwed up his face, turned away. “No, I never spoke to him.”

“That must have been lonely.”

Ren closed his eyes for a long moment; he appeared to be counting. Or debating something in his head. It did make Hux wonder, what coping mechanisms he’d been taught as a child. They clearly didn’t work, whatever they were.

And then he opened them again, and Hux found their depths more tired than irritated. “Hux. Why are you asking me about this?”

He shrugged, flicked loose hair from his eyes, scowled when it fell right back. “I never had friends, when I was a child. Or even if I was older, if I’m honest.” There was really nowhere to roll over on the narrow bed; pressing harder against the wall, Hux screwed up his nose, stared past Ren to the wall but an arm’s reach away. “I just cultivated contacts. Colleagues. I gathered useful personnel and made them my crew. But I didn’t make _friends_.” And he glanced down, caught between curiosity and genuine pity. “But you…you’ve always been alone. Haven’t you.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s all right, Ren.” And to his surprise, he meant it. “I think I understand, now.”

Ren watched Hux’s fingers play over the length of his collarbone, chest quickening with fresh arousal, though the suspicion had not dimmed. “Understand _what_?”

“What happened to you.” And he shifted his hips, felt their cocks press together; even as Ren drew a sharp breath, he only sighed. “I think we should have been friends.”

“Then what are we?”

“Memories, I suppose. Or we will be.” He didn’t quite bother to keep the bitterness from his voice when he added, low, “Certainly I’ll never forget you. Or what you did to me.”

Taking things to pieces had always been one of Hux’s favoured pastimes; he liked to see how they worked from the inside out. But, as he looked at Ren now, he recalled some things he had never learned how to put back together. “Please don’t go.”

“It’s for the best.” Again, he found he meant it, and could not help the surprise at how much that hurt. Ren’s hair trickled through his hair like so much sand through an hourglass. “You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be _alone_.”

“No.” Something in that hurt, even as it didn’t. “No, I don’t think so. Not anymore.” The kisses her gave him then were soft, easy. But Ren did not want that, not now. With a groan, fingers bruising demand, Ren hefted Hux up, slamming his back against the wall. Even as Hux bit into his lip Ren pushed in, face buried in the space between shoulder and throat. Already Hux could feel fresh dampness there, wrapping weary legs around his waist, locking the ankles tight together. In this he recalled exactly why he’d never allowed Ren this liberty before; already he ached all over, and the worst had yet to come.

“Let me in.” And Hux drew a startled breath, even as Ren gave a deep thrust, “It’s quieter, in your head.” His great hands could have enclosed his waist entire, and very nearly did as he whispered, “ _Please_ , Hux.”

The faint guilt of it did not last long. Ren would never have fallen for the trap if it had. Instead he opened his mind wide, felt Ren settling there like a stormcloud. Closing his eyes, Hux drew him near, and waited. It was easy enough, when it happened; orgasm took him hard, and his pleasure shifted outward in great rushing wave. Ren, on the verge of his own climax, could be nothing but helpless before it. He was taken down, dragged beneath, pulled out by the undertow, left adrift at sea, alone.

Hux staggered under his weight as he guided him to the bed, let him fall; Ren had already moved into deep sleep. As he dressed in silence, the memory of the song played in his mind on loop, relentless repeat. Turning, Hux swallowed hard. The too-long hair haloed his head, lay in dark ruin about his almost boyish face. Hux had been raised to resist temptation. But in this, he could do nothing but reach forward.

And of course Ren stirred beneath his touch. Hux cursed, but did not draw back; he’d already ruined everything, and all on account of his own foolish sentiment.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, more plea than order. And Ren shifted upon the edge of pure consciousness, voice barely audible as he refused even this simple order.

“But you’ll be gone.”

“You said I could go.”

“But we’re not nice people,” he slurred, eyes wide, struggling against unnatural sleep. “So why should I keep any promise I made to you?”

Hux laughed without humour, passing his hands over those damned eyes, closing them as he would those of a corpse. “Because I made mine first.” And he stepped back, heart aching, even as he wondered at the fact he had one at all. “Go to sleep, Ren.”

“I _hate_ you.”

They were the petulant words of a child, one sleep-riddled but still sent to bed too early. “I hate you, too,” he whispered. “I always have. I always will.”

When he shifted this time, face pressing into the pillow, Ren might have been laughing. In reality, he was probably crying. It didn’t really matter, because in the end he was sleeping, now, and Hux told himself that that was what he’d wanted anyway. And he closed his own eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and slid down into a boneless heap at the foot of the bed. He had work to do. But it could wait. Just a little. Just for now.

 

*****

 

As one of the academy’s top students, Hux had won many of his grades and accolades by way of excellent simulation skills. He knew the limits of such experience; even the most well-laid of plans could not help but buckle before the vagrancies of reality. But even that self-knowledge could do nothing for the fact that he himself was a general who moved armies to his bidding, not a soldier who walked alone into battle with only his sidearm for company.

“So, you have a plan?” Hux demanded, and could not help but feel grateful for the anger that kept the tremor from his voice. “Because I am not sure if you are aware of it, but I am a deadshot and a trained sniper. If I can do this from a distance with a blaster, then so much the better.”

Already Kenobi was shaking his head, lips pursed beneath the white whiskers of his beard. “We doubt that would be enough.” And he glanced up, blue eyes very calm. This was a man who had walked into hell with but a saber to hand. And Hux did not need to read minds to know what he would say. “You need to get close to him. Though a blaster shot should be enough.”

His quick mind could easily supply a thousand logistical reasons as to why that was madness. In the end, only one mattered. “Snoke wants me dead. He thinks I _am_ dead. I’m fairly certain he’d happily kill me on the spot without waiting for an explanation, if he so willingly sacrificed an entire crew and starship just to make sure my presence and influence were both cleanly wiped from his fleet.”

“He won’t realise it’s you.” In answer to Hux’s incredulous look, Kenobi nodded towards a locker. Even before opening it Hux grimaced at the low crawling sensation in his abdomen. The robes were familiar enough, but the shape beneath made him think of an artefact rarely glimpsed, misshapen and reverent upon its plinth.

His voice sounded distant when he said, “When did he get a new helmet?”

Kenobi’s distaste for it – and its clear resemblance to Vader’s own mask – could have been a living thing all on its own. “It was supplied to him. At the time he was ordered to scuttle the _Finalizer_. Charming thing that it is.”

Hux had never been prone to superstition. Still he could not bring himself to lay hands upon it, as if the inanimate thing truly had some life of its own. “Ren made it clear he had left without telling Snoke where he was going,” he said, calm, an officer about military plans. “Will he not be in some trouble?”

“Ben is essential to everything Snoke does.”

Though he closed his eyes, he still fancied he could see the holoplated eyes of the helmet staring right back. “Does Snoke realise he was made by Ben?”

“No.” But he spoke too quick; almost immediately he drew back with a short breath. “Well, at least, as far as we know, he does not. But he would not waste him in a fit of temper.”

“Ren would.”

“Snoke is different to Ren.” And he spoke sharp, the words swung with a brutal accuracy that reminded Hux this man had wielded a lightsaber for both the Order, and for the Republic. “Snoke wanted you dead. Ren abandoned everything to keep you alive.”

Hux closed the locker, still felt the staring blankness of the dead eyes from their plasteel orbits. “Don’t say things like that.”

“You could go back to them.” And he turned, frowning; Kenobi glared at him, words scathing and simple. “To your people. While Ben is not exactly the most… _reliable_ source of information at present, I can assure you: he was not lying about that. They are alive.”

He let out a long, trembling breath; his eyes burned, and he didn’t even entirely know why. And Then Kenobi looked away, to the opened ramp of the ship. Ren lay that way, sleeping and alone. Somewhere, in the distance, an ornithid screamed.

“You have a choice, Brendol.” He actually sounded gentle. “No-one will force you to make it.”

A scream of his own curled somewhere in his throat, tight and low. He kept it to himself. “Not even the Force itself?”

“The Force is neither Light, nor Dark,” he said, and before Hux could object, said, “It just _is_.” And when Hux kept his silence, he filled it with the calm ease of a true believer. “Think of it in terms of the Sith, and of the Jedi. If one is Dark, and the other Light, then the Force is but the axis upon with their world turns. Night follows day, and day follows night. Both are true. Both are inevitable.”

He snored, wondered why he cared. “So why try to suppress one under the other?”

“Because we all fear what we do not understand.” And he turned away, head bowed, a strange and dead thing that somehow felt more alive than the man he had just left behind. “I will leave you now.”

It should have brought him considerable relief. Instead he recalled the memory of a small child: packed upon a shuttle, sent to another starship where the academies were being rebuilt. No father, mother long dead. The Household droids specific to his care had scuttled and sold for parts. And now he would go, alone, into the black.

“Thank you.” The tone was formal, clipped, the one he had chosen for his most official of exchanges. “For your advice, and your assistance.”

An eyebrow raised high. Then, he shrugged. “I’m not accustomed to any kind of gratitude, let alone as gracious as all that.” His snort was low, only half-shielded by the way he turned away. “Too much time around Skywalkers, one supposes.”

Hux had long ago realised the old man only fell back on sarcasm as a crutch. He himself would have limped along himself in conversation without it. And yet, he still felt compelled to speak again, to make it clear. “I do mean it,” he said, the perfect low and clear baritone he’d learned in elocution class. “Obi-Wan Kenobi. Thank you.”

Old hands rose, drew the hood of his robes over his silvered hair as he nodded. “Then go in peace, Brendol Hux,” he said, words no less powerful for their softness. “And make your choice.” The ghost of his smile still shone as clear as the sun on a summer’s day. “And though I know you won’t like it, the Force will be with you.”

Without another word, Hux turned away. The ship lay before him in uneasy silence. And then Ren lay sleeping, somewhere behind. It seemed fair enough. He just rather suspected that even with the many lightyears he had yet to travel to his terminal destination, he himself might just never sleep again.

 

*****

 

At least his hands had refrained from shaking when he had programmed Snoke’s base into the navcom. The coordinates had been taken by Anakin Skywalker from the sleeping mind of his grandson. Hux had kept his thoughts on that sort of invasion to himself. It wasn’t that he regarded it as unfair, exactly, or unnecessary. Instead it treaded somewhat closer to the uncomfortable realisation that had he such abilities, he had no idea where he might have drawn the line. If, indeed, he would ever have drawn one at all.

His clearance through the planetary shielding also came courtesy of codes borrowed from Kylo Ren courtesy of Anakin Skywalker. His life had truly become a joke. But he was not laughing as he drew closer to his destination: a singular moon, trapped in orbit about a gas giant. Atmospheric storms curled about the globe in constant shifting chaos, far beyond the transparisteel of his viewscreen. Hux watched those storms as he allowed the tractor beam to take hold of the shuttle, hands clenched about the locked controls. It took him half the re-entry priod to pry them loose.

Kenobi had done something to him before take-off. It adjusted his Force signature – or so he said. Changed it just enough to make it appear as though he were Ren himself, though it would not hold up under close scrutiny, particularly not to anyone who knew him well. At a distance it would prove useful, or at least would permit him entry to Snoke’s demesne. Apparently having had been so recently so very close to Ren had helped cement the illusion.

Though his technically-minded brain could not quite trust such a lack of simple logic, Hux had kept his mouth shut. That last bit, at least, was something he could not deny. Even now he could still feel Ren moving inside him, Ren’s teeth on his shoulder, Ren’s shuddering release as he’d given himself so completely to Hux, even as Hux had betrayed him one final time.

The tractor beam brought him mercilessly closer; the planet itself felt to have come too close, strange bulk crowding out what little remained of the stars beyond the viewscreen. It had become too late to turn the ship to a collision course, ending deep within its burning heart. Hux knew he should have run. Ren himself had offered up the coordinates of the few survivors of the _Finalizer_.

Instead he looked forward to the moon, and to the small structure carved out of its left flank as it become rapidly more visible. The comms remained silent as he was drawn inside. No guards waited his arrival. He felt like a child dressed for an adult’s masquerade as he stepped from the shuttle, the hiss of the vented gasses announcing him as the parody of a lover now lost.

In fact, squinting at the uncomfortable projection of the helmet’s holoplate, Hux could detect no sign of any life whatsoever. Snoke’s base appeared utterly deserted. As he turned, again, Hux might have thought Ren was wrong, that Snoke had given him the details of a base long since abandoned to dust. But the creeping sensation just beneath his skin told him otherwise. Perhaps he had no real sensitivity to the Force. But Brendol Hux was not a fool.

And then the figures emerged from the shadows, and he knew that he had been a fool of the very highest order.

“You are not Kylo Ren.”

Neither he, nor Kenobi, had considered this. They came to him, all the same: six of them, masked, clad in black armour. His hand curled at his side; Hux had not once thought to carry Ren’s lightsaber, but that at least appeared somewhat seemed irrelevant when they themselves appeared not to carry them either. With that said the assortment of weapons at their disposal, and their sheer number and creativity, were hardly lessened in severity by the lone blaster strapped to his own hip.

Hux closed his eyes and cursed his own stupidity. He was going to die before he even reached Snoke. And on that distant Force-soaked hellhole, Ren was either going to go completely mad, or be summoned back to service by his imaginary friend and go madder still – and likely in a fashion fit to bring down the galaxy entire.

 _I’m sorry_. Not that he was sure who he directed that particular thought towards. Kenobi, perhaps. His father, unlikely as that was. Or perhaps simply to Ren himself, who did not even know what Hux had decided to do. It didn’t seem to matter. The failure was his own. He would bear it, not with pride, but with the understanding that he had become general knowing that such responsibilities could go no higher than from where they were ordered.

As in a loose avian murder, the six figures circled around him. Hux allowed it, hands held loose at his side. He’d become as a sacrificial offering at their centre. At that, he had to stifle a snort; perhaps they thought his blood-letting might summon their wayward master.

“Stop.”

Though the command had not been directed at him, Hux fell to complete stillness, even as they did themselves. And he remained that way while the six turned, as one. And not a half dozen metres away, he stood: Kylo Ren, unmasked, ignited saber hilt a burst of blazing fury from one still hand.

The very air itself vibrated, tasted of ozone and sulphur; fury poured off him in waves, but even that paled next to the mad grin on his face. Ren was caught utterly in the throes of unbridled _glee_. And Hux had never thought to have _missed_ such undeniable madness. But he had. Before him stood the Ren he had known from the _Finalizer_ : straight-backed and hulking, prowling out his paces, the lighted saber reflecting red in the black hollows of his eyes.

No, Hux had not liked him from the very beginning of their association. But he’d always admired a good piece of weaponry, and a focused Kylo Ren could bring down worlds, if activated in just the right way.

He continued to hold himself very still as Ren stepped closer; though there was but one of him, Hux felt as though he filled the entire space around them all, a shield and a naked blade both. He should have been furious. And yet, all he wanted to do was laugh and laugh and laugh.

“Step away from him,” Ren said, voice the low rumble of growing thunderstorm. To their credit, the knights shifted into loose battle formation, in clear unspoken communication with one another.

“You are a traitor to our cause,” said one, voice low modulation. Without his own mask, Ren’s voice cut through the air with the same low hum as his unstable blade, the promise of destruction to come.

“Yes. I am.” And his eyes flicked up, smile darkening further. “Hux.”

It was as if Death itself gazed upon him. He could not decide if his tremor was born of terror or ecstasy. “What?”

“Go.” His head jerked towards the path from which he’d emerged, eyes already flickering back to the faint movement of the knights between them. “Do what you came to do.” And he gave a loose, lazy twirl of the saber, twinned vents a dizzying cage about his gloved hand. “I’ll be right behind you. When I am done here.”

The moment Hux shifted his weight to his right foot, a knight darted for him. The blaster shot exploded at the level of his thigh, the creature’s cry more one of irritation than actual pain. Hux did not wait to see how effective that armour was. He ran instead. It was fortunate that the corridor took a swift sharp turn but moments from the hangar bay, though he had to pull up short to shoot three times more. But Ren drew them all back to himself, and they did not follow him far.

It shouldn’t have made sense. One of them could easily have peeled off from the group and taken him down before returning to Ren. Hux could only assume it was more Force nonsense, for there was more to worry about than that. _How is he here?_ The terror of it twisted, changed shape with every step he took. Perhaps Ren knew; perhaps Ren realised where Snoke had come from. _Do what you came to do_. The words beat against his brain, and still he did not know if they were an invitation, or simply a trap.

He hadn’t run far, though he had moved too fast; despite the weeks of tramping about in the forest, Hux’s breath came hard in the cage of the stupid helmet. Still he forced himself onward, coughing, choking on every indrawn breath. The damned allergies had weakened his lungs. Or so he told himself. The strange, crawling presence over his skin told him it was too late, anyway; Snoke knew he was here. Snoke was waiting for him.

The clashing sound of battle had faded long behind him and his lurching run slowed to firsy a jog, then a swift walk. Then, he just moved as if in a dream. It became more of a summoning than an active choice of his own. With his head held high in the borrowed mask, hands fisted beside him, Hux walked the impossible hallways. Their arching sides stretched tall above him in curves of smooth marble, darkly volcanic and mirror-like. In their every surface he could see reflected the ghost of Kylo Ren, cowed now beneath the legacy of Darth Vader: this strange conglomeration of a creature, gliding now amongst the dark as he moved ever closer to the fall.

The doors stood closed at the terminus of the corridor, black heartswood carved in patterns that did not invite scrutiny; Hux’s eyes slid off them even as he tried to look, his mind carolling warnings of madness and despair. But he did not need to touch them. As he drew near, they opened seemingly of their own accord. Hux took the threshold without pause, a soldier trained by simulation no longer playing at war.

Yet only a small room lurked before him. Hux had expected some great chamber, like the holoprojection suite upon Starkiller. It seemed more the deepest point of some small rabbit warren, rounded and hollow, a small figure sitting at its dead centre. Hux stopped before him without thought, lodestones repelled by like.

Snoke might have smiled, had the tight stitching of his mismatched features allowed such gesture. “You can take the mask off, General.”

Why he hadn’t taken it off long before, he would never know. It at least did not ruin his hair to do so; his hair hadn’t been regulation since the end of the _Finalizer_. But even standing before him in Ren’s clothing, over-sized and too loose in chest and shoulder, Hux stood straight-backed and tall. With hands folded behind his back, the motion of old come so easily, he stared down at the little creature seated before him.

“I did not think the title still mine.”

Snoke gave a vague shrugging motion; he truly was a peculiar little thing, outside of his projection suite. “You were not posthumously stripped of it, certainly.”

“But I’m still alive.”

And even with Hux looming tall over him Snoke sneered, almost lazy. “A temporary diversion, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” The truth did not taste quite so bitter as it ought to have. Shifting his weight, the blaster familiar bulk at his hip, Hux could not take his eyes from the reality of Ren’s most powerful delusion. He really was much smaller than he had expected, but then Snoke had used holos and projections for a reason. In the absence of Darth Vader’s guidance, Ren had needed something that loomed as large, a presence to block out all light and drain the sun of all life.

But in the end, Snoke was but a hobgoblin of imagination, a construction of smoke and mirrors with no real face of his own. Just a cobbled together horror of vague features. And there was a creeping curiosity upon them now as Snoke sat back in the simple chair that was no throne, observing him as Hux might some insect upon his boot.

“I would assume by your method of return, you have no intention of resuming your command.”

And Hux sorted, opened his arms wide. “Can you not see?”

An invitation it was not, but Snoke still frowned; Hux could feel him, at the edges of his thoughts. “There’s something wrong with your mind.”

“Aside from that.”

The chuckle of hoarse laughter had the resounding quality of actual pleasure. “I do know why you are here.”

“Then perhaps you could oblige us all by dying quietly so I can leave now.”

And he sighed, sounding almost pitying. “But you don’t really believe that would work.” Lacing his fingers together – and they were too slender, too long by half for the diminutive height he wore – Snoke tilted his head, utterly at ease in his place. “Because you are right, you know. I am part of Ben Organa Solo’s mind. Do you really believe he could stand to lose more of it than he already has?”

The chill of him now was as the cold vacuum of space, as if his corpse had already been jettisoned into the black. “You know.”

“Of course I _know_.” Leaning back, one stick-like elbow upon the arm of his chair, Snoke bent a wrist, fingers long and twisting in the air. “I’ve known from the beginning. I’m quite aware I didn’t just come into existence from nowhere.”

He spoke through numb lips, hands held tight to the point of bloodlessness. “And you’ve done all this.”

The little creature actually rolled his eyes. “Yes. And I have no intention of allowing you to ruin it for me.” And again, the faint parody of a smile pulled at the corners of a lipless mouth. “Don’t worry about Ben. He’ll be diverted out there as long as I have need of such diversion.” And he could have been speaking of the weather, of sunshowers on a distant arable planet when he said, “He’ll be here to see you die. Have no fear of that.”

They had attempted to school fear out of him, when he’d been a child. Even at that age, Hux had wondered at the sense of it. It seemed to him now that it was fear alone that kept his thoughts from folding in upon themselves. “And you don’t think that will do damage to his mind?”

He might have raised an eyebrow, had he any to his name. “How highly you think of yourself,” he mused, tapping one of those monstrous fingers upon what passed for his chin. “But, no. Han Solo’s death did not break him. By comparison, yours is but a graze to a decapitation.” And then he paused, again, darkly thoughtful. “Of course, he believes he loves you. But that was always the point.”

Hux did not recall reaching for it, but now he held the blaster in hand, muzzle pointed at the ground. Even with the sweat of his palms, his fingers closed very tight about its grip. “You wanted this to happen.”

“Perhaps. I did not plan it, if that is what you mean. There were always many paths Ben could take, to bring him to his final becoming.” The smugness of those words was infuriating; he had to hope he’d never sounded the same, not even about Starkiller. “But you…from the moment you met, you bickered like children.” An unpleasant thing very like a smile again perched itself upon his ruined features. “It fitted so very well with Ben’s whole idea of _love_. That was what his parents were, after all. Lauded as the greatest love story of the great rebellion, and yet all he ever saw of them were the arguments. The separations. The bitter recriminations that changed to sweet tenderness, but only behind closed doors where he might never ever see.”

The taste of vomit lay bitter upon his tongue as he raised the blaster. “I didn’t come here to listen to you.”

And one hand waved, casual by sight, dreadfully focused by intent. Hux had more than once seen his staff frozen in place by Ren’s Force hold, though he’d never had it turned on himself before. Ren had never quite dared, even in the worst of their arguments. But now, Snoke’s very presence seemed to press down on him from all sides, low and constant as an airlock first repressurising, and then refusing to stop at the point of equilibrium.

“No, you would prefer to listen to yourself,” Snoke observed, the only indication of his power one raised index finger. “And I did have use, once, for your voice and your oratory. But I am not in the mood for that anymore.” His opened palm slapped down upon the arm of his throne, and Hux collapsed to the ground like a puppet loosed from cut strings. “You have worn out your worth, General Hux. I have appreciated your long service, but I find must now discharge you from your duties.”

This went one step further than even the Force hold – because this, he had only heard tale of. He’d never seen it, had no real concept of what it would be, in reality. He saw it before it hit, like brilliant discharge from a resonant transformer arcing between them. And then, he lay upon the floor, blaster fallen from his hand, his entire body jittering in muscular spasm. When Kenobi had channelled the Force through him, it had been as a burning. This was something else: humming, skipping, dreadful pulsing energy threatening to shake him all to pieces.

And when it died down, a pitying voice echoed though the ringing agony in his ears. “Ben is neither Jedi nor Sith, that is true.” He chuckled, his voice for a moment but pure parody of the few holorecordings that remained of Sheev Palpatine. “But he has the potential for both,” he said, and Hux felt rather than saw him lean forward, both hands raised. “In that, so do I.”

It coursed through him, again: blue-white agony, tasting of blood and stormclouds. But somewhere, even in the tangle of his thoughts, he remembered Kenobi, his eyes very blue in those moments after he had worked the Force through him.

_That is how you imagine the Force to be._

But that was imagination. This pain was real.

_You burn and burn and burn. And you never go out._

Hux closed his eyes, and lay very still, even as the Force pulsed through him. As the lightning died away, slow and tortuous, Snoke rose.

“Oh. Was it so very easy?” Despite the lack of height, the creature loomed over him, shadow made long and dark by what little light surrounded them both. “Come, General. Stand up. Ben is on his way. I should so hate to have you die without him here to see.”

“I’m not going to die.” He stared at his hand, twitching helplessly but a moment from his blaster’s grip. “Not before you, at least.”

The lightning struck, as he had expected. Again he lay very still. The agony had become something distant, even as his body began to bow, to break. It paled by comparison to the memory of Ren: those great dark eyes, wide in the face of one who had never really matured beyond the dreams of a foolish child. And that song, playing on the radio, as Hux had moved upon him. He’d trusted him, then. And Hux wouldn’t betray that trust. Not when it came of a lonely child – one who only wanted someone to believe in him. To trust him. To love him.

_He only ever wanted a friend._

Snoke poked at him with one tiny foot, shifting him like a slab of meat. “Dead, then?”

Hux smiled. “No.”

“Good.” He withdrew his foot. “Just a moment more, then.” And now he hunkered down beside him, voice a low crawl beside his ear. “It will all be over, soon.” The words caressed over his burning skin, a lover’s sharp knife. “Because I’m the only friend Ben Solo ever needed.”

It should have been obscene. But then, to Hux’s mind, it made perfect sense: the creation of a lonely child’s mind, determined to protect itself at all cost. To make itself premier, by taking away anything that might challenge its superiority. And, somewhere back in the ache of his mind, Hux could recall the faint memory of a holovid, recording the death of one man. Hux had not known Han Solo. But even he could mourn the futility of it.

“General.” One terrible hand lay gentle upon his shoulder. “Are you ready to die?”

Hux turned his face just a little, just enough. “You’re not real.”

Snoke smiled. His fingers gave a short wave and Hux hissed at the flicker of lightning that danced over his skin. “Real enough, I should think.” His head rose, looked to the still opened doors, a predator catching scent of his prey. “It’s over, General.”

He tried to shake his head, found it only rolled on limp muscle. “No.”

“Yes.”

“ _No_.” Although all he felt in this moment he felt little more than disgust, Hux started laughing. He supposed it was understandable. Going mad really seemed the simplest of solutions to all his problems. “You might be Ben Solo’s friend, but you’re his _imaginary_ friend,” he said, and laughed even harder as his hand closed about the blaster’s hilt. “And I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe in you.”

A single shot was all it took to end it. It felt too easy. So Hux shot him again. Snoke had crumpled to the floor, his compact form shifting, changing, turning to something like dust and ash. On his knees, now, Hux smiled. Three more shots, and then the magazine clicked over, dead. Hux still pulled the trigger another two times. His body gave up then; when he fell over, hot cheek now pressed to the cold floor, Hux closed his eyes and wished he had something in his stomach to throw up. It would achieve nothing significant, but at least it would be something to shift the feeling of nauseated despair.

The footsteps that approached came muffled, out of time with the tripping beat of his own heart. Then hands pressed on his half-numb skin. “Hux?” Ren always had been too loud for his tastes, vocal modulator or not. “ _Hux_!”

Forcing his eyes open, finding they would only permit him a pained slit, Hux still glared up at Ren. “What…what about the knights? Are they all dead?”

And Ren’s expression, which had started out something like terror, abruptly hardened. _Good_ , Hux thought. _At least he hasn’t forgotten entirely how to be a warrior_. “No,” he said, and his voice had dropped to the cold depths of an unknown ocean. “I killed four of them, but the other two…stopped. I…I guess it happened when…you…” So sudden his voice broke, left him a soft and strange thing as he looked up. The remnants of Snoke had not moved, inert and impossible upon the marble floor.

“Is he dead?”

Hux would have rolled his eyes, if he hadn’t feared they’d fall out of his head if he tried. “I don’t know. I suppose so.” And now he shifted, elbows pressed into the floor, trying to lever himself upward. “What about _you_?”

Ren, to his credit, did try to help Hux sit up. He even managed to keep his hands to himself when Hux made it clear he didn’t appreciate the assistance. “What about me?” he asked, instead, and Hux sighed. He could have asked a thousand things and still never received the answer he needed.

Instead, he laid a hand upon his cheek, fingers upon the edge of the scar that cut his face in two. “You’re a Knight of Ren,” he mused. “And you’re still standing.”

“I’m not one of them anymore. And I was their Master anyway.” Ren’s eyes flickered again, back to what remained of Snoke. “You killed him.”

“Well, it was him or me.” Hux grimaced. “Although in all honesty, it’s more likely to be both of us, in the end.”

“What?”

He did try to smile. The wrench of something breaking loose rendered the effort entirely moot; heaving with sudden agony, he doubled over, coughing into his hand. And he stared at his palm: bright red, viscous and vicious both.

“Hux—”

“What are you even doing here, anyway?”

The ugliness of the words had Ren scowling. It did actually suit him better than misery, Hux supposed. “My grandfather said you’d gone. To kill Snoke.” And he set his jaw, primed for fresh argument. “He said I shouldn’t let you go alone.”

Hux had run a very tight ship, and so was generally unfamiliar with such blatant idiocy in the ranks – or at least he had been, before Kylo Ren. And perhaps this was why the Empire had risen from the ashes of the dead Jedi Order, even though Hux couldn’t imagine Kenobi would have approved of such action. But then, he could remember the old man’s words so very, very clearly.

_It is a Skywalker trait, I’m afraid._

He cleared his throat, wanting to shout. In the end he only managed to spit the words out like a curse. “Your grandfather is a fucking idiot.”

Ren rocked back on his heels as it shot. “My grandfather was Darth Vader!”

“Like I said: a fucking idiot.” He’d spoken too hard, and too harsh. With his lower abdomen on fire, Hux groaned, pressing hard fists into it as it might do anything for the pain. And then he shook off the hand on his shoulder. “Don’t…don’t,” he gritted out from between clenched teeth. “It _hurts_.”

“But—”

And he held his head up, flicking sweat-drenched hair from his eyes, smile more teeth than lip. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” He’d intended to sound irritated. Instead, he could not mask the simple relief when he looked at him now. Ren was an idiot, yes. A child, still. But whatever Snoke had been to him – he was gone, now. And for the first time, he allowed himself to feel genuine pleasure at the sight of him. “You’re…alive. I didn’t…I wasn’t sure this would work.”

Whatever Anakin Skywalker had told him, from the perplexed look now upon Ren’s face, it hadn’t been enough. Typical Skywalker nonsense, indeed. “Hux,” he began, but Hux waved it off with one faltering hand.

“Maybe your grandfather can explain it. I don’t know. I just…it would have been nice, to see it. What happened, I mean. If it fixed you.”

His eyes wandered sideways, to the mass of ash that had been the worst of his excesses. “But I’d already left him.”

“But he hadn’t left you.” And Hux sighed, closed his eyes. “Go home, Ben Solo. Your mother worries about you.”

Pale and trembling and somehow deeply furious, Ren dug fingers into his shoulders; his lips twisted about a promise that seemed more invocation of the damned, if the red light in his dark eyes was anything to go by. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

Hux wanted to laugh. The blood pooling in his guts stopped him. That hardly seemed fair. “At least when history calls me a deranged lunatic,” he said, with genuine good cheer, “I can still say I was not as deranged a lunatic as you.”

And then, he died.

And yet, the end result seemed no more peaceful than the physical process had been. No sooner had he closed his eyes than a small hand closed about his shoulder, giving it a strong shake. _Typical of Ren_ , he thought, bleary and furious. _Just let me die in peace._

But then, it was a very _small_ hand.

“General.” Again, the shake that only made his headache rattle deeper into his brain. “ _General_. I must speak with you.”

A woman’s voice – and her accent was something cultured and careful, a dialect of Basic older than the current Republic. “Oh, kriffing hell,” he said, already knowing what he would see even before he opened aching eyes. “ _More_ of Ren’s crazy family.”

Padmé Amidala sat back on her heels, the rich embroidery of her gown spread over her knees. One elegant eyebrow had arched high, her dark eyes something startlingly close to that of her grandson. Hux could no madness in them, perhaps. But there was something in there Hux would not have cared to face upon a battlefield.

“I had thought you to have been raised better than that, General,” she said, very clear and very disapproving, and he could only snort even as he felt himself draw upright, hands unconsciously moving to smooth out the lines of his ruined clothing.

“Yes, well. My father _did_ have very rigid ideas about how one might speak with senators, though he did draw a distinction between those of the Republic and the Empire, I’m afraid.”

They might have debated this for hours; he would even have enjoyed it, given Senator Amidala had intrigued him, even as a child. But Padmé, her long hair loose about her shoulders and dotted with white flowers, only shook her head. “You’re not dead.”

He blinked. “What?”

“You’re not dead,” she said, impatience already creeping into her voice; she had always been known as a woman loathe to suffer fools. “You have work to do,” she added, and nodded to her left. “He needs you.”

Hux didn’t need to look to know who she referred to. “No,” he said, but rather than sure and certain, it just came out weary. “No, I’m done with all this now.”

“You are not.”

One of his strongest subjects in the academy had always been debate. And it mostly had been because he’d never been afraid to use the tactics and the knowledge that were most incendiary to his opponents. “If I recall my history,” he said, slow and distinct, “your death coincided rather sharply with Anakin Skywalker’s beginnings as Darth Vader.”

The darkening of her expression reminded him starkly of the holovids he’d seen of the command centre, when the Death Star had fired upon Alderaan. All systems had been routed through the primary ignition source, sending the entire station into temporary dormancy, its entire focus spent upon the weapon alone. “It did,” she said, flat. “I made a mistake.”

He could not look at her. So he made a great show of looking at Ren instead. It wasn’t really the better choice, considering he now bent sobbing over his body. “It seems a speciality of your bloodline,” he remarked, with more distress than distaste, and she snorted.

“Don’t speak to me like that, General.” But there was a softening, there; he could tell she had already turned her glare away, looking to her wayward grandson. “I made a mistake, and I freely admit that so you do not do the same. And I did it because I believed my influence over Ani had waned, that I had done all I might for him.” She glanced up as he looked to her; the meeting of their gazes hurt like a physical blow. “It was easier, that way. To think perhaps others would take my place.” And her eyes drifted back, to the ruin of her grandson. “That our children would do what I could not.”

He held his silence. He was not an unreasonable man. Even if he would much rather have been a dead one.

And Padmé sighed, bowed her head, dressed in the gown of a dead woman. “Many politicians seek immediate glory. They want, while they live, to reap the benefits of the seeds they choose to sow. And then there are those of us who tend those saplings planted by ourselves and by others, knowing we might never see the end results of our work.” And she looked up, eyes dark, the very centre of the expanding universe. “In the end, we all make our mistakes.”

Hux swallowed hard, looked down at his still hands. “I never should have touched him.”

“But you did.” Her empathy closed about him as might her arms, though she did not come close to him at all. “And now he is yours.”

He chuckled, utterly without humour. “I find it kind of strange, you know. That anyone would approve of my influence over him.”

This time, the senator held her silence.

“You’re going to say something about the Force, aren’t you.”

“Love is love, General.” And this time, her hand upon his shoulder was a gentle farewell. “Even the Force cannot change that.”

He could have said something more to that – and probably something unrepeatable, at that. Yet everything about him had changed, become death fading back into the harshness of life. Padmé Amidala was smiling, retreating back behind the veil between worlds; it left him only Ren, now several feet down the wall from his slumped body as if it had frightened him into final retreat.

He sat like a chastised child, back to the wall and knees drawn up, head in his hands. The only sound he made now was faint, as if he were breathing very low, and very quick, although not quite crying. But it was neither, really. Hux sighed. The idiot was _singing_.

And then, as if a switch had been activated, he stopped, sat up very straight, eyes wide and face pale and blotchy. He’d never been a pretty crier. That had never stopped Hux from liking it.

“ _Hux_?”

“That song.” Coming so close to death had left him hoarse, apparently. He still managed to snarl out the words in a fashion that would have done his former rank proud. “That _stupid_ song.”

Ren, on hands and knees and halfway back to him, stopped dead. “What?”

“I remember, now.” Hux closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the smooth wall, somewhat too hard; it still didn’t dull the agony in his guts. “That song was written about Padmé Amidala, wasn’t it.”

“So?”

Hux allowed his head to fall to one side, expression flat and eyes accusing. “I hate your family. Your _whole_ family.” Twisting his lips, he considered his options, he added with airy fury, “Including Obi-Wan Kenobi. Because he counts. Oh, kriff it, how he _counts_.”

Whatever paralysis had held Ren still in the earliest moments of his resurrection seemed to have quite dissipated, now; Hux squirmed under his touch as the bloodied hands cupped his face, eyes wild where he forced Hux’s to meet his own. “How is this possible?”

He jerked his head free, kicked weakly at him; Ren backed off maybe a foot, but it would have to do. “Apparently, I decided not to die. Even though I did decide to die. _Kark_ , this hurts!”

“I’m not going back to my mother.”

“Oh?”

“I’m staying with you.”

It was only by sheer force of will that he managed to bully his broken body into letting him sit upright enough to snatch at Ren’s ragged collar. “I’m never going to be accepted by the Republic or the Resistance, Ren,” he said, very sharp and very clear; he’d have shook him if he’d had the strength, or even the belief that Ren had any sense left to be shaken back into him. When he smiled, it was all teeth and bright blood. “You can run with me, if you want. But you can also stop whenever you want. So why start now?”

Ren only stared. But the pallor of his earlier shock had already begun to fade, his eyes dark and darting now over Hux’s face. “You don’t have to run.” And before Hux could think to shout, one hand extended, the hand taking in the entirety of their surroundings. “We’re at the heart of Snoke’s operations, here.”

Already his burst of energy had begun to fade. Hux’s grip loosened, spine slackening though he did not lie down just yet. “So?”

“So.” And his smile was brilliant, bright, and utterly mad. “I could make you Emperor.” But it was the excited chittering of a child, one offering up his entire toychest of treasures just so his new friend wouldn’t leave him alone. “I know you’ve always wanted it,” he added, words tumbling over one another in desperate sudden desire. “I could retrieve Phasma, and Mitaka, and the others—”

Only Hux’s rising laughter could stop him dead. And Hux himself stopped only when it hurt. Then he just started all over again. “Old man Kenobi wouldn’t like it,” he managed, finally. Ren’s wide brow, drawn down in dark confusion, made him look a petulant child. Hux could only be surprised by how comforting that was.

“What?”

“Obi-Wan,” he said, very slow, as if speaking to a child. “ _Obi-Wan_ wouldn’t like it. In fact, he’d be very disappointed indeed.”

And now Ren sat back on his heels, stuck between utter confusion and something very like suspicion. “What do you care about Obi-Wan Kenobi?” And, seemingly because he just couldn’t help himself: “And you sound like Master _Luke_.”

“How very unfortunate.” He meant it, too. And he wasn’t just talking about Ren’s former master. “I don’t want to meet him, by the way. I did tell you I hated your family, right?”

Now Ren covered his face, leaning forward, groaning as if the weight of the galaxy had suddenly just fallen upon his broad shoulders. “ _Hux_ ,” he said, and Hux very nearly pitied him, even as he looked up, eyes tired and dark and so very desperate. “Hux, what do you want?”

And he smiled. “Well, I had planned on dying, and for some reason I never got much beyond that, so.”

On his knees before him, Ren was as a wellspring of power, offered up to his influence without hesitation. Hux would have destroyed worlds to have this, once. Now, it only left him tired, almost fond. He supposed the irony of that was what Kenobi would have called the Force at work. How he hated that old man and his damnable wisdom.

And Ren sighed, shifted; his robes, tacky with blood, caught on the shining floor. “Well, I want you,” he said, and he was scowling like it would endear him to anybody. Hux wouldn’t admit that it did, even when he added, “To stay with me.”

Leaning back against the wall, Hux rolled his eyes. “And what about what _I_ want?”

“Well, what _do_ you want?”

The frustration of those words had him smiling. He’d always loved a good quarrel. And Ren was always so obliging about participating in them. “A smoke. And a nap. A handful of painkillers. Not necessarily in that order.” And then he groaned, one hand pressed over the ache of his abdomen. “I’d also appreciate it if you starting doing some of the actual work around here, because I’m tired. And I fixed you. So.” With his very best general’s snap, he said, “Do some bloody _work_ , Kylo. Or Ben. Or whoever you are now.”

Of course Ren didn’t listen to him. He never bloody did. Instead of the prescribed _yes, sir!_  Hux only got something like laughter, something like tears. “And then? What do you want, then?”

He closed his eyes. Then he opened them. “And then, I want to reap what we sow.” It didn’t actually matter that he had no idea what seeds had now been planted. They would all find out, one day.

And as Ben Solo helped him to his feet, he could not help but be glad he would be alive to see it happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got this far: thank you. So much. I mean that. I've never been much of a fanfic writer anyway, and the way this fic ate my brain in all the worst ways has just let me despairing of ever writing again. I stumbled into the kylux fanfdom quite by accident and thought I could have some fun here, but...I'm just constantly terrified of writing badfic and just embarrassing myself. This fic kind of turned into the culmination of all those feelings, so...I have an exchange fic to write, and I'll do that. But I think I'll have to drop out of the fandom then. I just worry far too much about ruining these characters, and I...yeah. I don't know. I'm very worn out from this story, I suppose. But it means a lot, if you got all the way to the end. At least two of us made it, here. I'm just sorry that all you got here was to see me crying at the end of it.


End file.
